The Casebook of Wingrove Conrad

Who could guarantee that, in addition to the arrow we had discovered, there weren’t other signs hidden on the walls or elsewhere, in the combination of the stain above the sink and the peg that lay on top of the cupboard, for example, or in the scratches on the floor… For every sign deciphered by accident how many might go unnoticed, buried in the natural order of things?

WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, Cosmos

Many pundits in the mediascape are astonished that Aristodemos Duchamp has had the nerve to break the taboo on adapting the Conrad novels by Reynaud Travert. He has produced what is simultaneously the easiest thing to watch on television, and the hardest to understand. To some, it is wildly experimental and stretches comprehension to the edges of sanity. To others (to most) it is so banal as to have no entertainment value at all.

A woman is talking on the phone. She chuckles, thinks, replies with few words. We have the idea that perhaps she is listening to a confession. Her dark eyes crease. Then the scene changes. A tall man in an awkward grey suit visits to a large corporate complex and waits to be seen by someone who seems to be in authority. Their talk is incoherent, mumbled. Another cut. Tradesmen argue and talk in an obscene way. They study a map. A well dressed man talks to a woman in an opulent venue. He appears to be trying to persuade her to do something. Our minds begin to take in these various threads and begin sorting and weaving to produce a storyline, a narrative of events with consequences, and the expectation of meaning.

This is the beginning of The Silent Clairvoyant, the third episode of the season. Duchamp is a seasoned showrunner, with a thorough understanding of how to utilise the craft of television writing to make compulsive viewing. His masterful And In The End was a deftly constructed deconstruction of police procedural tropes that was at the same time a huge mainstream hit. It took to pieces and reassembled not just how a crime is investigated, but the nature of objective evidence, human knowledge, law and the social contract, and even the process of storytelling itself. It dominated the Golden Globes, and nearly broke social media when its ambiguous ending left many craving closure.

He stumbled a little next with his attempted adaptation of Faris Mendes’ The Perfect Man, a novel about the perfection of mankind’s potential under the capitalist system. Many regard the novel as satirical, although it is as divisive as the work of Ayn Rand, and has many devotees who treat its celebration of the commercialisation of every aspect of life as no less than fact. Duchamp’s interpretation, his first literary adaptation, faltered between these two readings, giving it an insincerity or even sarcastic tone that made it difficult to stick with. Nevertheless, it was an astounding debut from Markuss Roggeveen, playing the man perfected by the economic system in which he is raised and has prospered. As leading roles go, this was one of the most monumental performances in recent times, as utterly compelling as Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview or De Niro’s Max Cady. If the series itself was quickly forgotten, it launched a major talent.

An adaptation of the Conrad novels has been in the works for many years. A team surrounding the actor and writer Rembrandt Logan have several times begun the production process, developing scripts and once even starting to cast the principal roles, but each time it has just not worked. Bence Sheehy, riding high off the back of the second season of It Doesn’t Have to be Complicated, attempted an early draft, but has not since seemed able to operate a typewriter. Niko Jamison was attached to the project for a while, bringing with him massive Generation Z appeal. But he couldn’t last the course, and is reputed to have stated that he’ll never again attempt to work with Logan. There is something particularly challenging about the novels that had begun to make them seem unfilmable. The taboo was broken when Duchamp reached out to Logan to suggest one last try at the impossible adaptation. Like an impetuous gambler, Duchamp is staking his credibility and entire career on this piece of work. Which is why critical opinion and the reaction of the mainstream viewing audience is so interesting.

It has long been said trying to film them would be to undo the purpose of the books. The difference between the direct perception of film and the unreliable narrator of literature is perhaps at its most extreme with the Conrad novels and any attempt at adaptation. It is the very act of reading and engaging with the narrative that is the actual subject of the books. This is what must be transferred to the screen in order to remain faithful. The stories themselves, the described events and reported speech are of no consequence. It is the reader’s interpretation that Travert considered to be the subject matter.

And so a woman stands by a window and looks out onto a suburban street as dusk draws long shadows. She spends some time conversing with a man who sits patiently on a bed. We might be reminded of an Edward Hopper painting. We don’t really need to listen to what she is saying. She mumbles and makes references to things of which we know nothing. The man’s reaction doesn’t seem to trouble her. He shouts for a while, reminding her of responsibilities. It seems that he said exactly the same things to another character in an earlier scene. We make more connections.

This is a mainstream TV series, but at the same time a psychology experiment and exploration of our subconscious processes. Duchamp’s promotional strategy is to claim that this is new ground for television, that the series will make huge demands of its audience to make any sense, and could dredge up frightening or unsettling aspects of viewers’ own private memories or desires. The atmosphere is somewhere near Lynchian - there is something like the same sense of the uncanny - something misplaced or not quite right. Quite often we are unsure what is going on and cannot help but provide our own attempts at answers to the questions the (lack of) narrative demands. We are watching something that perhaps Antonioni or Roeg or Resnais might have persevered with, but made with the prodigious production talents of David Fincher.

Rich production values, that is all most people watch TV for these days, Duchamp has observed of much of this golden age of television’s worthy output. He has been vocal of the “bourgeois aesthetic” that makes much television drama indistinguishable. Cinematography that is too achingly beautiful, set design that merges with the aspirational homemaker ads that are interspersed with the broadcast, characters too good looking and stylish to relate to. The drama takes place in the same land as the absurdist scenarios of the advertisers. TV’s entire world can only provoke aspiration and envy. So the production of Duchamp’s Conrad adaptations embraces these values in order to dislocate them. The banal familiarity of the TV world allows the actual content of the drama to call into question the very act of watching it.

The framework of that intended subversion is the detective story. Conrad is an unreliable detective, and as the (lack of) narrative advances, we begin to question whether there is indeed anything to investigate, whether any crime has actually been committed. Travert’s novels always started with Conrad confessing to the reader that a crime has been committed and that he will assemble evidence that provides a plausible explanation of the crime.  But as the narrative of the novel progresses, we begin to doubt the causal connections Conrad is making between the events and motives he claims are part of his solution. As the novels move towards their conclusions, we even begin to doubt that any crime has been committed. Instead, we begin to question the methods and integrity of the patently unreliable narrator. It seems we can interpret the events he describes as random, or sometimes possibly coincidental. The locus of attention is shifted from the construction of a narrative of motive and means of the crime itself (if this in fact occurred), to the deconstruction of the methodology used to construct any narrative, and indeed the construction of order and meaning through human perception.

The classical detective plot, from Poe, Chesterton and Conan Doyle onwards, is usually two stories - the crime itself in the past, and the detective’s investigation as an analysis of this past crime and the construction of a narrative to explain it (and usually to reveal the perpetrator). There is almost always a psychological element, in which analysis and reason are used to work out the motives and means of the criminal, who has often used rational means in order to plan and commit the crime. There is often also a social dimension - the crime is often shown to destabilise the community in which it occurs, or to reveal elements of moral decay or corruption. The solution and explanation of the crime reassures the bourgeois community about the stability and validity of their lives.

In Travert’s novels, however, perhaps we’re being told about the unreliability of human perception and the brain’s insatiable need to recognise patterns in randomness. We are shown how superstition seems to preoccupy any understanding of human agency. The focus of the detective’s explanatory narrative is instead turned on the reader’s sensitivity to connections between the random events. One cannot help but make the connections even though the scenes are almost certainly random. Hence, we go from a reliance on (and almost certain triumph) of reason and rational investigation as the normal method of revelation and analysis, to the revelation that these methods are merely a manic activity, certainly of the detective Conrad, and perhaps of the brain itself, which cannot be stopped from making connections between any of the inputs of the senses.

Almost all critical evaluations of the Conrad novels concentrate on this aspect of the works. Conrad is not just an unreliable narrator, but a method of turning back on the reader their desire for order and meaning and for examining the link between the narrative form of stories and the causal connections humans use to understand the world. Dennis Pratt’s seminal study Conrad and the Apophenic Narrator (1973) was the first to make an attempt at a clinical diagnosis of Travert’s “detective”, establishing a convincing case that Travert was depicting a sufferer of apophenia, often a precursor to schizophrenia, in his novels. Others, most notably Anna Adsila’s 1996 study Wingrove Conrad’s Overactive Imagination, have argued that Travert is not trying to medicalise the condition suffered by his unreliable main character, but rather to show how this fundamental trait of the human brain creates meaning, shared symbols, the entire construct of the mental universe, and pushes further and further with its voracious need to make connections between things, creating superstition, paranoia, religion, and even the scientific method. She suggests that Travert is showing that the brain’s obsession with pattern recognition, despite being the foundation of so much human meaning, is actually a profound problem. This is no way to live in harmony with an ecosystem, but rather to have to live with a powerful distraction at every moment, interpreting things, wishing for other things, trying to create order where there is not necessarily any. It is little wonder that sages through the ages have recommended meditation as a way of being freed from these torments, and these days modern gurus try to sell us mindfulness to avoid these overworked thoughts. Most scholars interpret Travert’s works as a depiction of the pathology of overdeveloped human cognitive capacities.

As we read Travert’s work, we very quickly become engulfed by the sensation of apophenia. Something in the way the novels are constructed means that our brains are overjoyed at the nourishment their apophenic desires are indulged with. So many potential connections to make and motives to ascribe, so many links in a chain of causation that we’re very soon sated and gasping with joy as our synapses are overloaded with potential connections. A snapped twig on the ground in The Missing Girl makes the shape of an arrow pointing to the door of the initial suspect. The number on the door happens to match a watermark on the letter from the apparent blackmailers. The scratches on the door that have been made by a dog trapped inside seem to spell out the name of the girl who has disappeared.

Apophenia is the name given to the central skill of human cognitive abilities when it goes too far. It is pattern recognition when there is no pattern. It is seeing things in random arrangements of objects or causation in random events in time. It is this skill that humans have used throughout their cognitive development to interpret their surroundings. The usefulness of being able to discern danger by being sensitive to patterns in nature probably promoted the trait throughout evolutionary history. But this means that now humans cannot tolerate randomness, and by extension, meaningless. Philosopher Daniel Dennett says in his 2006 book Breaking the Spell, “Humans are creatures that crave to find order and meaning in their environment. Not only do we want to find meaning in our surroundings, but we need to do this.” Humans are compulsive pattern seekers, the raw fuel their brains need to make meaning. In his works, Travert is asking us if we are already taking this skill too far, if perhaps our precocious mental powers are finding too many patterns and too much meaning. We spend too long in the abstractions we create from these patterns, pondering meaning and possible connections, studying the world in ever more detail to discern more patterns. We inhabit a mentally constructed habitat now, an ecosystem of meanings, rather than living in harmony with reality. We take our projections of meaning seriously as reified truth. This is perhaps even more problematic now than when Travert was writing in the 1950s. His novels are interpreted as a criticism of human alienation and our refuge in signs and symbols, abstract ideas and scientific theories. It seems that he was sceptical about much of human culture, and seemed to believe it was the result of the pathological mania of the human brain to create abstractions and alienate itself. This is why the overpowered human brain cannot stand too much reality. It needs those dots to be connected. It needs there to be more than there actually is.

But what would he make of our flight from reality in the 21st century? Apophenia is a serious concern in the age of information overload. There is now so much information flooding our mental processes, deliberately so in the cynical capitalism of the “attention economy”, that we are certain to spot patterns and find clues to connections between random pieces of data. We follow these clues away from reality and into the rabbit holes of conspiracy and alternate facts.  The way apophenia works means that these patterns in random data are more real to you than the opinions of experts or the official version of events. Because your brain has powered away and made these connections, it is a visceral reality that you have laboured to produce. You have worked it out for yourself and found your own Eureka! moment in the random noise of the modern world. That Eureka! moment is an endorphene rush, a reward system sponsored by apophenia. You own it. It’s your reality, even though no one else knows what you are talking about.

While Travert scholarship often finds itself preoccupied with his use of the unreliable narrator to critique the alienating nature of human cognition, readers are often perplexed, irritated or plain offended by the character of Conrad himself. He is the dirty lens through which the action is framed. We’re not told too much about him - he seems to be a petty official in the tradition of Dostoyevsky’s anti-heroes - nor where he lives or any detail about family. The novels are set in America, but the imagined America of someone who has yet to visit, and Conrad himself seems to pride himself on his European preoccupations. When the novels begin, he does not simply accuse the apparent perpetrators of the crime under investigation, but proceeds with covert surveillance and appears to become gradually more involved in the life of his target, sometimes in an intimate way. We must become comfortable with his mood swings, which can range from grandiose statements of power and influence, to long pages of impatient theorising or criticism of the reader. It seems that he values his own moral fortitude above all else, but at the same time will indulge in such hypocrisy and cowardice that we’re not sure if he is capable of understanding the concept of morality. And of course, about halfway through the investigation of The Silent Clairvoyant he performs one of the most sadistic acts of 20th century literature, the prolonged and vicious torture of a mentally ill young man. Because of the unreliable narration, some have interpreted this infamous and often unreadable scene as a depiction of Conrad’s own descent into a form a schizophrenia, the violence and torment being his own inner anguish.

Of course, it is Conrad’s vivid flights of imagination that create the comical and engaging tone of the works, and from which we draw our sense that just maybe he is onto something. We are his accomplices as he becomes needlessly involved in the lives of others. It is part comedy of manners as coincidence and misfortune draw him closer to those he suspects as having committed a crime. In The Missing Girl, it is a series of outrageous twists of fate that mean Conrad ends up living with Mrs Andrewson. At each point it is reinterpreted and analysed by Conrad, and all other possibilities considered, until the steps to the living arrangement seem entirely plausible. As Conrad’s imagination adds flourishes to every aspect of his experiences, so his paranoia means he must examine and analyse every action and detail until he throws himself exhausted on the divan. His life seems to be a constant tension between speculating on everything that could happen and analysing the actual finite details of what has happened. The present as such, and the possibility of living freely in the moment, seems out of reach. We’d call it overthinking these days.

Many have speculated that Conrad perhaps has a legal background, given that he spends much of his narrative going over the deeds of those he observes and becomes involved with. But it seems more likely that his concerns over morality and transgressions stems from a religious education.

Once you notice the religious element in the Conrad novels, it is difficult to ignore. In fact, you begin to attribute many of the connections that Conrad (rightly or wrongly) makes between pieces of evidence to his desperation to discover that there is more to life than the banal finitude of the everyday world. It seems his analysis is the desire to transcend the limits of time and space, of being stuck in a physical form and subject to the laws of physics. Conrad’s hyperactive mental processes try to draw the essence out of everything, to test it and squeeze it until it reveals its sacred being. He is a modern pantheist, finding an animating force in everything, discovering a rich interconnected world where others see only drab coincidences in a mundane existence. Indeed, in his more wretched moments, we can interpret his anger as a loss of faith or anger at god. When the connections fail to resolve into a clear answer to his questions, he is utterly deflated at the lost potential, as if he has been let down by the divine spirit. Several times he exclaims that everything is connected, that we are all one. At times he seems like a new age guru as he makes these claims. But when the connections lead nowhere, he sulks and sinks into deep holes of despair as he trudges uninspired through the godless wasteland. The novels always contain scenes of existential dread as they move towards their conclusion. This is what happens when the connections fail, when the brain is refused the nourishment of meaning. There remains just the contingent nature of the world and its people, random interactions and meaningless glances, accidental death and unwanted birth, the constant rearrangement of elemental particles and the whim of chance. But nothing at all to explain it.

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Conrad and his creator both shared these religious agonies. In fact, through the character of Conrad, it could be said that Travert documented his own loss of faith. This is especially true if we include the incandescent moments of transcendence that fill the novels, the intense highs that punctuate the definite drift towards faithlessness.

Reynaud Travert was born in Charleroi in 1907. His parents did not bring him up with any religious convictions, indeed the very reverse. They were free thinkers and highly critical of the church. His father was a doctor and made some discoveries and modest contributions in the field of endocrinology. He suffered from black depressions and found relief in charitable work and giving free medical assistance to others. Travert’s mother had assisted with efforts to set up the Conseil National des Femmes Belges, and Marie Popelin was a frequent visitor to the house. She corresponded with many young women, offering advice on overcoming prejudice and gender roles, and organised campaigns for universal suffrage. The house was known as a headquarters for radicals and progressives. It was into an atmosphere for social advancement that Reynaud was born.

It was the experience of the first world war that disillusioned Reynaud’s parents. They become more sceptical of rationality and more fatalistic. In the biographical notes we have, Reynaud records that his father became cynical and withdrawn, accepting fewer visitors to the house, if any. The experiences and images of war and the Rape of Belgium had created a profound shift in his belief in the potential of humankind. His medical practice changed to expect more responsibility from patients - he was short-tempered with those who suffered with what we would today call PTSD. He was less forgiving, and angry. Reynaud, who was an anxious and sensitive child, picked up this hardening of his father’s once liberal outlook. The post-war period in broken Europe made Reynaud realise that there were hidden agendas and sudden twists of fate that could disrupt life, that all the dreaming and optimism and high ideals could be crushed under seismic levels of stupidity. Like his father and mother, a terrible pessimism gripped Reynaud. His school records show that instead of diligence in his academic lessons, he became more distracted and inclined to produce imaginative written work and occasional violent drawings.

A famed incident in Travert’s early life took place with the national trauma of war and his father’s recurrent depressions in the background. Reynaud was disturbed when he thought he could see the face of Christ on a breakfast waffle. The housekeeper witnessed his panic when she put the breakfast in front of him, and reported it to his father. For hours the boy would not let anyone touch the waffle, and even though no one else could make out any shapes or faces, he was convinced that he could clearly see Christ’s likeness. For a while he was hysterical. His father tried to understand the situation in a rational way, but his son was exhibiting behaviour that he had witnessed so much in the war’s aftermath that he had stopped seeking any rational resolution. Instead, he called a priest.

This incident, perhaps combined with the generalised collapse of order and expectation that the war had caused, seemed to push young Travert towards the stability of the church. He took more of an interest in the stories and teachings of Christianity than he did with any of his school lessons. Indeed, against his father’s wishes, he entered the Catholic University of Louvain to study philosophy and theology. His interest in religion, and indeed his very quick conversion and devotion to Christianity, was perhaps a way of rejecting his father’s pessimism and cynicism, and an attempt to build a foundation on which to build a life. He had been affected by the collapse in belief in rationalism that he had seen in his father, and many of his contemporaries. He wrote, “The teachings of Christ made far more sense to me, especially the paradoxical word of the bible. It could not be understood with reason. It made no sense, much like the world, but made order out of senselessness.”

We know of the waffle incident, and the motivations that drove Travert into such intimate involvement with the Church, because of a series of notes he made later in his life, when he had renounced his religion and was preparing for psychanalysis. We don’t know whether he was analysed. At this point in his life, he was corresponding with numerous psychiatrists and psychologists, and there may have been opportunities and invitations to undergo professional treatment. He had entered the darker later stage of his life, when he was also working on the Conrad novels. It is difficult not to compare the confessions of the notes for analysis with the distorted outpourings of his infamous fictional creation.

By the time Travert was ordained a priest in 1929, he was thoroughly devoted to god and the certainties of religious doctrine. He first went to work in a small village near the French border. For a short while he was able to devote himself to the traditions and rituals of a provincial Catholic priest. He integrated himself into the community and continued the healing process that his predecessor had initiated after the horrors of the war. It was a quiet life, and soon Travert became interested in how the routines of the locals and the eventless cycle through days and weeks meant they often attempted to create conflict between themselves. Frequently, they seemed to suspect each other of misdeeds based on little more than suspicion or wrongful interpretations of innocent actions. Travert was often required to be the arbiter of these disputes. He was intrigued that they seemed to emerge from nothing more than boredom. It was almost as if, he posited, there was some innate need to discern impropriety amongst the inoffensive actions of a close community. Perhaps the human brain needed more to process than the simple routines of villagers, and was prepared to invent things to amuse itself. The imaginative potential of the villagers seemed to be obsessed with petty moral transgressions. Indeed, Travert himself became a victim of this gossip-mongering when he discovered he had been suspected of an affair with a villager after being observed visiting a widow too often in the days after he had administered last rites to her husband. The spurious scandal eventually forced Travert to relocate to a suburb of Brussels to continue his ministry.

This stage of Travert’s life marked the apex of his religious devotion and the beginning of his catastrophic loss of faith.  Even in the city with its multifarious distractions and wider groups of communities, he noticed that people were still driven by suspicion and ungrounded fears. In the confessional he grew tired of hearing gossip about neighbours and acquaintances, suspicions of wrongdoing and petty accusations.  At first, this led Travert to make an attempt to counter this trend, and he used his teachings and sermons to persuade his flock to stop suspecting their neighbours. But this seemed to increase the snooping, as the parishioners increased their concern for the moral wellbeing of those same acquaintances they suspected of misdemeanors, and so the confessional gossip increased. Indeed, they began to suspect each other of all kinds of crimes and perversions.

Travert retreated into his faith. He desperately sought guidance from the scriptures and spent hours in prayer and reflection that might bring some clarity and insight into his frustration. He spent so much time in meditative silence that he began to fear he might be suffering from hallucinations. On a few occasions he experienced euphoric visions and periods of timeless transcendence that he treated as mystical experiences. At other times, he noted that if he did not rigorously focus his mind on scripture, it seemed to wander off on its own and begin its own speculations on the proclivities of his flock. This angered him even more. In response, he sought to chastise his flesh, and took to wearing a cilice at all times. He embraced his faith with utter devotion and was determined to find a way to save their souls.

It was the appearance of Leopold Török that resolved the impasse and utterly changed the course of Travert’s life. Török may have been a vagrant, or perhaps someone who had escaped from an institution. Travert knew of him, had heard various stories about him from his parishoners’ gossip, and would have seen him about in the streets around the church. But then suddenly he began to visit the confessional on a regular basis, and so began the series of conversations that would go on to be documented in the posthumous The Török Confessions. Their dialogue went on for weeks, and became a profound exploration of god’s ability to act in the world. They began their early sessions with arguments about St Thomas Aquinas’ depiction of God as the Prime Mover, who can act in the world only by being the source of all things, and who exists outside of time and hence cannot intervene in the lives of his creation. Török was convinced that the proof of god’s existence was instead within his actions in the world, that the creator of all revealed himself in these actions, even if it meant that He became bound by the constraints of time and the laws of the universe. Indeed, Török argued that it was the pattern of these actions, if studied diligently enough, that revealed the purpose of the universe. They necessarily departed from the teachings of the church, because god was still acting in the world and revealing himself to each individual. Hence the established church stood in the way of true understanding by its dogmatic insistence on just one facet of the reality of god. Török contended that each person must find their own signs to find their own messages. The notes Travert began taking as he realised the impact the meetings were having on him - that would later become The Török Confessions - clearly show Travert questioning his own faith in any creator, and his rising interest in the pattern-seeking skills of the human brain as he became fascinated with Török.

Travert would have seen patients with schizophrenia, and other mental health problems, in his father’s house when he was younger. He knew the signs and symptoms that evinced the troubled minds, but it is likely that his conversations with Török were the first time he had engaged in any serious exploration of such thoughts and ideas.  There was a moment in their talks where Travert begins to understand that Török’s explanation of a multitude of seemingly random events and signs made as much sense to him as Catholic doctrine made to Travert. Perhaps it was at this moment that Travert began to see faith itself as a mental interpretation of external prompts that seems to “work” and becomes something that stops the mind questioning. One of the more interesting passages in the notes from the Confessions is when Török describes the euphoria he experienced when he made the connections between the signs he believed were sent by god. When he recognised shapes in random patterns, or an event occurred that seemed to directly answer a problem in his life, it was a feeling of having decyphered the mysteries of creation, of the beauty of the overall design being further revealed. This spoke deeply to Travert, who recognised something of his own reaction to the face in the waffle.

Just as suddenly as he had appeared, Török disappeared, amid rumours of child molestation that spread through the congregation. Soon after, Travert records that he completely lost his faith. He remained in post, but began to seriously study works of psychology, and to closely document the thoughts and actions of his congregants.

Travert began the process of deconstructing his own faith, beginning with the waffle apopheny and his subsequent earnest embrace of Catholic dogma. He was intrigued by the emotional aspect of the pattern recognition, the euphoria that Török had described. This is how he had felt when the answers religion had given him had chimed with the questions about the world he had as he was entering early adulthood. Because he had not been raised in a religious household, it was as if he were discovering the answers for himself, and he discovered the joy of making the journey into faith for himself.

The rites and rituals and unchanging cycle of the Church calendar allowed him to take his mind off the day job and focus on the study of psychology. Indeed, it could be said that he began an ethnographic survey of his flock, recording the irrational conclusions they drew from commonplace events and coincidences. The depth of their superstition continued to surprise him as he listened to their confessions and tried to provide pastoral advice. He noted that they would do anything they could, however far-fetched, to add a reason to an accident or coincidence, a piece of good fortune or bad luck. Any reason at all, but they could not accept that stuff just happens.

We also have some of the letters that Travert wrote to a university friend who had joined a mission in the Belgian Congo. Laurentin Leblanc had been ordained with Travert, but the certainty of his faith and national pride led him to consider missionary duties in his country’s colonial lands. He wrote frequently to Travert, describing life at the mission and the challenges he faced. But Travert was far more interested in the lives of the local Lese people, especially details of their religious rituals and attitudes before their conversion to Christianity. This folk religion fascinated Travert. Leblanc describes the way witchcraft and retribution seemed to be at the centre of everyone’s lives. Nothing happened without being ascribed to witchcraft or the interference of an ancestor. Travert’s notes show how he drew parallels between the behaviour of the Congolese tribes and the relentless gossip of his congregants.

And then the war engulfed his existence. It seems that he was initially tempted by the fascist Rex party, and became involved in meetings around the start of hostilities. But this may have been a symptom of his crisis of faith, and the profound period of doubt he was going through. Soon, however, he was active in the resistance effort, organising escape routes for Allied pilots. It is believed he organised a Comet Line safe house during the German occupation, and it is there that he made another important friendship that would have a deep effect on his life and work.

Travert’s notes mention the name Wingrove Garbutt for the first time on December 10th 1942. A radio operator in the US 306th Bomb Group, he was the only survivor when his B-17, on a sortie to Bordeaux, was hit by anti-aircraft fire over northern France. He found his way to the safehouse in the Brussels suburb that was maintained by Travert. While Garbutt awaited false papers to allow him to travel onwards through Paris and out of occupied territory, they spent much of their time discussing philosophy and theology. Their friendship developed quickly, perhaps because Garbutt could speak a little French, and had been raised a Catholic. Garbutt described some of the things he had witnessed in the war, terrible scenes of cruelty and immorality that had made him question whether it was possible that there could be a god. Just before Christmas, we know from his notes that Travert confessed his loss of faith.

Garbutt had majored in psychology at college, and they discussed behaviourist psychology in depth. Travert was fascinated in the central tenet of this school of thought that all behaviour is learned and there is nothing innate. This was a fresher and more scientific way of understanding humans in Travert’s eyes, without the heavy baggage of mysticism and dogma that clouded his own attempts to work people out. It was certainly more appealing to Travert than the mysterious sexualised urges of Freudianism.  Indeed, Garbutt’s remembrances of life back home in San Diego and of the USA in general seemed to be descriptions of another world to Travert. Garbutt’s family had migrated to California from the midwest during the Great Depression and Travert was entranced by the perilous journey they had undertaken. The scale of American life fascinated him, and he was captivated by the centrality of the experience of freedom in the national outlook, which so contrasted with the limited horizons of his own life.

These descriptions of American life may have blurred into the fictional, for Travert notes that Garbutt was a big fan of American noir movies and detective novels. He entertained Travert with retellings of these stories in the weeks they spent together. We know from Travert’s notes and from his later writing that he became fascinated by British “Golden Age” detective novels of the 1920’s and 30’s, especially Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr.  Others in the safehouse also appreciated Garbutt’s abilities as a storyteller. Travert notes that Garbutt was accomplished at setting the scene and pausing his narrative at just the right point to heighten the intrigue and ensure his audience leant in ever closer. Those few weeks were a time of levity and optimism for Travert, and had a deep influence on the escape route from his crisis of faith. Unfortunately, it is believed Garbutt’s escape route ended shortly afterwards, when he was shot at a German checkpoint on a train leaving Paris.

One further incident, which occured a few months after Garbutt’s departure, is curious because there is no mention of it in Travert’s notes from this time. We know of the events from the observations of the social historian Adélard Dufort, who documented much of the German occupation of Brussels and in fact later corresponded with Travert. Dufort recorded in his diary the very public ill-treatment and murder of the vagrant Leopold Török by a group of Nazi soldiers. For several days, there were arguments in the street between Török and some of the soliders using a café near Travert’s church. The arguments may have started as part of the daily friction of existence under the occupation, but soon became dangerously personal and political. At some point the soldiers decided to make an example of Török’s public disruption, and they fastened him to a post in the street so he had to remain standing through the night. The next day the soldiers returned, and this time began to taunt the exhausted Török. Perhaps Török’s mental illness meant he was unable to let the matter drop, and he resisted the soldiers’ taunts until they began to physical harm him. It was almost a mock crucifixion. Török loudly condemned the soldiers’ actions and called out to passers-by and nearby shop-owners to assist. Dufort records that at one point Travert himself was sent for, and even dressed some of Török’s wounds himself, which makes the absense of the incident in his notes even stranger, especially given the religious aspect of the torture and their previous close friendship. It has been suggested that he also took Török’s last confession there in the street. The next day the soldiers once again returned, and began their physical assaults against the debilitated body of Török, eventually killing him.

Travert left the church before the war was over and returned to the family home in Charleroi. His father had continued his medical practice throughout the occupation, but was becoming frail and nearing the limit of his ability to work. He was being nursed by his wife, but she too was struggling. Travert stayed to support them, but most of his time was spent in a reflection on his spiritual crisis. His notes reveal his state of mind around this time, and also give us sketches of how the family lived. Travert initially found it difficult to confide in his father about the events that had taken him from the waffle apopheny through to the Török’s confessions and his crisis of faith. They spoke often, but formally and without really daring to discuss the deep thoughts and feelings that were possessing Travert. And then Travert’s mother suffered a stroke and became utterly dependent on a nursing routine that father and son shared between them. Over time, the father noticed how this seemed to indulge some form of penitential impulse in Travert and confronted him about it. Travert was shocked by the encounter, but perhaps more so by the revelation to himself of this aspect of his character. His notes are filled with angry outbursts about his shame. The incident seemed to change the father-son dynamic, however. They spoke openly about their relationship and the path Travert’s life had taken. At this point in Travert’s notes, he outlined his intention to create a work that would analyse the human condition and show why religion was a central aspect of consciousness.

It is believed that the work was suggested by Travert’s father, perhaps as a way of channeling his son’s crisis of faith and general anxieties. (Indeed, it is likely that the father was trying to steady his son’s rather troubled life in readiness for his admission to the Grand Orient de Belgique - his father was quite an active Freemason.) Travert’s father had shown him an edition of Rorschach Test – Psychodiagnostic Plates, and Travert had been shocked at how he could perceive all kinds of shapes, faces and human actions in the blots of ink. The father had an understanding of what we would call confirmation bias these days, something he understood was at the heart of what his son was struggling to articulate. Travert notes that his father quoted Schopenhauer, “An adopted hypothesis gives us lynx-eyes for everything that confirms it and makes us blind to everything that contradicts it.” It seemed to fit with Travert’s own conclusions about how pattern recognition is a ceaseless activity of the human brain and that not being able to link together disparate sense data into some meaningful pattern causes anguish and misery.

It is likely that Travert’s finished opus would have been an explanation of his former religious cravings from an anthropological or psychological perspective.  His records of conversations with his father showed that by now he had a thoroughly materialistic understanding of the world, and wished to investigate religion and superstition from this grounding. He understood the world as human agency and biological forces and twists of fortune, with nothing more. He noted how he became an atheist after realising the anthropomorphic genesis of religion. The human brain is seeing patterns where there are none and then ascribing agency to these, the agency of a god. But Travert wanted to extend this treatment much further, and to define consciousness itself as a pathology, an overdeveloped nervous system. A process of pattern recognition that is out of control and has led to the pathology of the human condition itself. He wanted to argue that these patterns have become the content of human understanding of reality, and that all philosophy is just arguing over our alienated abstractions rather than embracing what’s real. He notes that there is no such thing as mental illness as all human behaviour is a pathology, hence all human creativity and art is pathology. His study of the pathology of human consciousness would have included case studies drawn from his congregants and penitents.

Indeed, some scholars have claimed that his notes suggest he wanted to develop his theory of religion to argue that religion is a necessary part of human consciousness, in that it provides a way of calming the manic pattern recognition activities of the brain by providing a comprehensive explanation for all the patterns the brain deciphers. This acts to short-circuit the relentless processing, and ends the anguish caused by the brains’s determination to keep working on suspected patterns. The evolution of religion may have been the brain’s attempt to cure its own overdevelopment. It might have been a tantalising contribution to the formative years of cognitive psychology and comparative religion.

He worked on the treatise day and night, frequently exhausting himself and in no fit state to nurse his elderly parents. The German occupation ended, and then the war. For the next few years, Travert lived in his preferred ascetic way, away from the torments of reality and desire. He may well have continued his work indefinitely had it not been for the sudden loss of both of his parents, possibly of neglect, within a few weeks of each other. Travert was desolated, and again overwhelmed by crisis. His work stopped while reality engulfed him. And then he decided to destroy everything he had written.

His notes survived the destructive act, and include a rationale for the destruction. He despairs at any attempt to rationalise or explain human behaviour. It is a paradoxical endeavour to use reason and logic to explain something inherently irrational and impulse-driven. How can a pathology account for itself? Far better to attempt explication through fiction, via a symptom of the pathology itself. The human brain understands things via narratives; it is built to imbibe myth. Its outpourings, whether actions or words, are similarly mythic and defined by narrative rather than logic. Stories are our only way of understanding. So Travert began writing fiction.

Wingrove Conrad investigated his first case in Travert’s debut novel The Silent Clairvoyant in 1953. There were few copies sold. It would take a few more novels featuring the detective before the reading public noticed, but once they did, they became intrigued and sales rose sharply and remained consistent. The ambiguity of the narrative, the way readers are forced to make their own meaningful connections and arrive at their own judgements, rather than being spoon-fed by an earnest detective in the crowded parlour room of the dénouement, meant there was much chatter about the experience of reading the books. The frenzied anger of the protagonist, his highs and terrible lows, meant the books were considered borderline indecent. This added to their appeal. René Magritte is known to have been a fan, drawn by the absurdity of some of the situations the unreliable detective finds himself in.

Perhaps it was Alain Robbe-Grillet who was most directly influenced by Travert’s work soon after it was published. Robbe-Grillet’s debut, Les Gommes, a detective novel that attempts to subvert the conventions of the genre, was written before he was aware of the Conrad stories. In accordance with the aims of the nouveau roman, Robbe-Grillet’s detective story tries to avoid psychological depth and realism, and instead promotes techniques that imitate the detachment and suspended judgement of the camera lens. But with Les Gommes, the application of this aesthetic is perhaps not disciplined enough - it evokes a sense of confusion and disorientation that really only alienates rather than challenges the reader to question the tropes of the detective genre. It is said that Robbe-Grillet was intrigued by comparisons of the novel with the work of Travert, and this seems to have helped him sharpen the nouveau roman techniques considerably. We can see a clear influence in La Jalousie, where the suspicions of the unnamed narrator are developed through detailed descriptions of the quotidian world, and repetitions of events of no consequence. Robbe-Grillet has pared down Travert’s sometimes overwrought obsession with apparent connections to leave the focus on the act of interpretation that make us complicit in the suspicion of betrayal.

More recently, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition contains an explicit homage to the detective in the name of the character Wingrove Pollard, who uses skills of pattern recognition in the service of national security. Gibson writes, “There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there’s not, you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect.”

With the modest popularity of the detective series, Travert’s world opened up a little, and he began numerous correspondences with other writers and some academics. Sometimes these reached the public sphere, most famously when he used in La Libre Belgique to publish a long diatribe against Jean Piaget’s theories of cognitive development in children. The two had been writing to each other occasionally with ideas about the development of the brain, especially how cultural conditioning can affect the formation of what was generally considered innate instincts. For Travert, nothing could explain the development of the human brain that did not treat it as pathological. His own views on child cognitive development were that they were stages in the development of a pathology, of an evolutionary mutation that had gone badly wrong. Piaget did not respond to the article.

In 1959, Travert was surprised to be invited to America by Aldous Huxley. The two had begun an intermittent correspondence after Travert had written a long letter to Huxley with his own interpretation of the events of 1634 that were depicted in Huxley’s novel The Devils of Loudun. Huxley had been intrigued by the deep analysis of his novel, and the ideas Travert had to explain some of the fanaticism that led to the events. The invitation was made after Huxley read one of the Conrad novels and was equally impressed. Travert travelled to California and was overwhelmed by the experience. It had been years since his friendship with Wingrove Garbutt and the stories he had told of American life. Travert had never expected to experience the reality; for him it was an unreal fable, bigger than myth. Unfortunately, during the visit, the two did not really get on. Huxley was brimming with the ideas and optimism of human potential. Travert, despite the Californian sunshine, was becoming more convinced of human neural development as an evolutionary mistake. He argued that the brain was a morbidly overdeveloped part of the nervous system that did nothing more than demand stimulation and prevent contentment. Huxley replied quoting Pascal - “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It is said that Huxley encouraged Travert to try mescaline, in the hope that a psychedelic experience would break open Travert’s narrow preconceptions. Some biographers claim that Travert was genuinely interested in the effects of psychotropic drugs on perception and cognitive function, and did indeed spend several days tripping out at Huxley’s ranch. It is even claimed that Huxley had to stop him going too far in his search for “pure sensation” without interpretation or judgement. It is also rumoured that Travert was carrying a copy of Huysmans’ A rebours, from which he quoted frequently. The visit has been mythologised in the intervening years and perhaps never even happened. Nevertheless, the two had trouble getting along in person, and Travert cut his visit short, much to the relief of his host.

Travert died four years later, hit by a tram. He had made his first confession since leaving the church two days earlier.

---

“We were very interested in how Travert influenced the nouveau roman,” Duchamp tells me with one of his mischievous grins. “The technique in La Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie was a strong influence on how we adapted the Conrad novels and presented them to a television audience. The removal of the narrator as a character seemed to unlock a lot of the problems that have prevented successful adaptations of Travert’s work in the past.”

Many critics have commented on the fact that the Conrad character is actually entirely missing from Duchamp’s adaptations of the novels. Instead, the scenes are presented without the often hysterical voice of Conrad himself making connections between apparent coincidences and discerning signs and symbols where others see only chaos. The scenes are presented without voiceover, or even incidental music.

“We have a serious problem with television removing the very skills with which people understand story and narrative. There is very little input required from an audience these days. Music tells them how to feel and the expositional dialogue goads the story along like a heavy-handed cattle herd. Imagination and empathy are not required. An active role in the construction of the story and its meaning is utterly forbidden. And this is even before we realise that most programming is built around a police procedural. This is all people watch. The same story that doesn’t need them again and again and again.”

Does the austere style you have used in your adaption mean people might regain these skills?

“Ha! No, these skills are gone now. Perhaps they cannot survive when mass media is our storytelling medium and even that is treated as “content”, a kind of visual gloop that keeps eyes fixed on screens. No, perhaps all we can do is draw attention to the lost skill of involvement.  Television talks with cliches, and says the same thing every night. Beware. Trust no one. You’re a failure unless you buy this.”

It is a daring thing to remove the main character of a novel when adapting for the screen.

“The character of Conrad seemed to be in the way of the ambition of the work. The point of Travert’s work is to make you aware of the way the brain itself is trying to impose meaning on the data that are supplied by its senses. Travert does this through the discord between Conrad’s own interpretation and what he reports to the reader in the same narration. But because of the immediacy of the medium of film, we can remove the narrator voice and instead supply the sense data to the viewer to interpret and use the powerful suggestive potential of the medium to wrongfoot the brain’s activities. In fact, I would say that Travert’s argument, that the brain is trying to enforce meaning onto things that are meaningless, is easier to convey with television than with the written word. We’re in a post-literate age now. Words, and the logic of sentences and the accumulation of argument are not how we think or communicate any more. We use images. For us, images are truth, and they are where we look for meaning. So the divergence between observation and interpretation that we encounter in Travert’s work is more difficult for us to appreciate. Whereas, with imagery, our brains are making connections and value judgements and interpretation without needing to think. So we can place viewers in the position of Conrad and have them become aware of the ridiculous need for meaning of the human brain.”

So instead of an unreliable narrator, you are showing the medium itself is unreliable.

“Yes, exactly! It is why the medium is used so successfully as a narcotic, because it provides the mental stimulation that the brain demands at all times, but with no further consequence. It neutralises the circuits of the senses and imagination. Neil Postman described this process in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Think of the horror and outrage and envy and pity and terror that we witness each time we watch the news media. How can anyone watch children starving, then a murder case, then the regrets of a drugged-up celebrity, then the bomb blast in a city street? If we reacted as a human should, we would have to turn it off to weep and recover our emotions. But we don’t. We watch more and more, educated each time to not care. We become immune to injustice and apathetic about suffering. To quote Postman, it is the soma of Brave New World.”

You have tried to unpick narrative structure with your adaptation, as you did with And In The End, but there’s a feeling you have gone too far this time.

“That’s correct. That’s because we have tried to use television as an art form rather than a political tool to narcotise the population. That is going too far.”

Is there not a danger that you have produced a piece of what’s called ‘ambient television’? You’re expecting people to engage with your production and put themselves in the place of Conrad, as you’ve said, to solve incidents, crimes, possibly murders, that in all likelihood have not been committed. Because of the visual nature of the medium, is it not more likely that people will entirely miss the lack of any narrative and instead tune out on production values, nice things in the production design they can search online for, or lose themselves in the nostalgic fashions you’ve used.

“But this ambient medium relies on a storyline template you have seen so many times that you no longer even register it. The film grammar, the moments of tension and resolution are usually so brilliantly written and prepared that you don’t even notice them anymore. It’s the structure taught in screenwriting classes and film schools. You are so desensitised to it by over-exposure to it. While we were preparing the show, we went right back to the early cinema, to Eisenstein’s theory of montage, to that experiment by Kuleshov. We removed all the clutter of expectation. We have just images and the connections between images. This is the theory of montage. We show something, cut to something else. The brain makes a connection, even though you have just seen two sequential images that perhaps have nothing at all to do with one another. Now we are onto the same thing as Travert. We show an image, cut to another, another. You’re expecting a scene, made up of shots that are cut together without you noticing. This is the soporific grammar of television. We challenge that. Our images do not form scenes. We repeat the same shot sometimes. We reject the pre-structured experience so you have to engage with the sense data itself. You make your own connections. We have tried to form a critique of narrative as a structure, that this is a projection and need of the human mind rather than anything you will find in reality, the cycles of nature and the entropy of the universe. Contrast this with the narrative requirement of conflict and resolution. Do these requirements come from the bicameral structure of the brain - that there are two sides that need to be resolved? Is all drama an attempt to cure this discord?”

In your adaptation of Travert’s The Story Thief, you have added a kind of subplot, if I can call it that, of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which one of the characters, if I can call them that, seems to become obsessed by, we can’t be sure.

“Well, here is the modern manifestation of Travert’s ideas. Here are connections being made between arbitrary things in the service of the brain’s need to believe that there is something more than there appears. It is the torment of the human experience now we have wired together all these twitching overactive nervous systems with the internet. We can only expect more of these absurd conspiracies as this networked apophenia increases in connectivity and processing power. Like Travert argued, the human brain is not a marvel, but a pathology. Instead of simply living, we have to produce all this artifice, all this distraction, all this analysis of this artifice and distraction. It is our duty as artists to show the true blighted nature of the human creature. The grand narrative of our species is that we are detectives finding out the truth about the universe. We are deluded.“

The woman looks at the camera for some time. She looks down at a note. We see writing on a piece of paper held by a man in a leather jacket. He walks across a room and places the note on an ornate bureau. Tradesmen argue and talk in an obscene way. They study a map. A well dressed man talks to a woman in an opulent venue. The man walks down stairs in a dark house. He passes the exterior of a suburban house and looks up at a window. We see the map again, a finger tracing a route. A woman is crying. The screen fades to black.