Conrad - Final

Candidate Number: 50445

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The writer known by the name of Joseph Conrad began his career in the late 19th century, in “a

world of infinite possibilities”: a world of “no morality, no knowledge and no hope”; the world

of Darwin, whose theory of evolution proved that man is “part of the animal kingdom”;1 the

world of Nietzsche, who “forb[ade him]self the lie of belief in God”, who declared that “from

now on morality will be destroyed”;2 the world of Thomas Hardy, who personified an amoral

model of the universe in his fiction, as a “First Cause work[ing] automatically like a

somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage”.3 To Nietzsche, “plunging into [such an amoral]

reality”, would “once again give the earth its goal and man his hope”,4 but Conrad participated

more fully in the “fin-de-siècle” zeitgeist when he announced his horror of a world “without

thought, without conscience, without foresight... a tragic accident”.5 “Infinite possibilities” were

the result of a perspective which limited Christianity to a certain time, place and culture - one

system of explaining the universe among the many which Conrad was to encounter on his

travels - leaving cold, objective, amoral science as the only universal, ontological point of

reference, for men whose moral conventions were being increasingly threatened by “the

horror” of an inner animal. Hannah Arendt locates in this period “a preparatory stage for

coming catastrophes”,6 and it cannot be doubted that Conrad’s own literature reveals uncanny

links to the early twentieth-century phenomena discussed by Arendt. Like the fascists and the

communists of the Second World War, characters in Conrad’s fiction “create substitute

religions” in order to escape the “cultural despair” or “angst”7 felt by men like Decoud, who

lose “the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things

of which we form a helpless part”.8 Nevertheless, if Conrad and Nietzsche shared a conviction

that “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions”, the latter was

alone in wishing to enforce an arbitrary “rule of art over life”.9 Conrad’s work neither

“surrender[s] to the radical scepticism of the Nietzschean outlook”, nor does it attempt to

“counteract the implications of modernity [through] a willed regression to a pre-modern frame

1 Conrad to Cunninghame Graham, 31 January 1898, in Watts, ed. (1969), pp.70-71. 2 Smith, ed. (1996), pp.134, 135. 3 Ingham, ed. (1985), p.331. 4 Smith, ed. (1996), p. 76. 5 Conrad to Cunninghame Graham, 20th December 1897, in Watts, ed. (1969), p. 56-7. 6 Arendt (1966), p. 123. 7 Passmore (2002), p. 19. 8 Holmes, ed. (1996), p. 377; all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to Nostromo. 9 Speirs, ed. (2001), pp. 874-884 (878, 883).

9. “Outside all social restraint and hypocrisy, against the backdrop of native life, the gentleman and the criminal felt not only the closeness of men who share the same colour of skin, but the impact of a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter, that is, for the full realization of their own phantom-like existence. Native life lent these ghostlike events a seeming guarantee against all consequences because anyhow it looked to these men like ‘mere play of shadows’.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Word length including footnotes but excluding bibliography and title: 5999


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of ethical and aesthetic reference”, for it always, paradoxically, succeeds in maintaining two

convictions:10

Words fly away; and nothing remains, do you understand? Absolutely nothing, oh man of faith! Nothing [...] Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.

Conrad to Cunninghame Graham, 15 June 189811

It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the freedom of moral Nihilism. I would require from him many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope [...] What one feels so hopelessly barren in all declared pessimism is just its arrogance.

Books (1905)12

Here, Conrad both affirms the power of fiction as a “saving illusion”, and confirms its status as

illusion; the artist’s “acts of faith” “fly away” just as they begin to acquire the certainty of an

“undying hope”. They are saved from the “hopeless barenness“ and “arrogance” of “declared”

ideologies by finding their significance in “no thing” certain or determined, only in the

persistent “act” of “cherishing”. Their virtue is thus in a persistent state of becoming.

This quality to Conrad’s fiction may be elucidated by contrasting Heart of Darkness (1899)13 with

contemporary “adventure fiction”, from Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885)14 to

Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912)15. Conventional forms of the genre, in purporting to be

“non-fictional... educational and inspirational”16 created “fantasy representations of the colonial

universe [...] which act[ed] to endorse racial solidarity, invite the closing of ethnic ranks, and

confirm western codes as human norms and ultimate measure of moral standards”.17 The Lost

World is particularly striking, not only in its thematic parallel with Heart of Darkness’s

“wanderers on a prehistoric earth” (HoD, 35), but also in its failure to register the earlier work’s

“transfor[mation of] the characteristic genres of colonial fiction into vehicles for reflecting on

the precepts, values and habits of thought native to these categories”.18 In his disregard for

Conrad’s “ironic view of the genre”, 19 despite an unavoidable awareness of “the most powerful

thing ever written on the subject [of the Congo]”,20 Conan Doyle continued to combine “horror

and laughter” in the violence of his imperial hero, whose affinity with the Nietzschean

übermensch thence prefigures the violent racism and cultural expansionism of the Nazis:

In this great district the wild rubber tree flourishes, and has become, as in the Congo, a curse to the natives [...] A handful of villainous half-breeds dominated the country, armed such Indians as would support them, and turned the rest into slaves, terrorizing them with the most inhuman tortures in order to force them to gather the india-rubber [...] Lord John Roxton [...] formally declared war against Pedro Lopez, the leader of the slave-drivers,

10 Erdinast-Vulcan (1991), p.22. 11 Watts (1969), p.89. 12 Conrad (1949), p.8. 13 Armstrong, ed. (2006); all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to HoD. 14 Butts, ed. (2006); all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to KSM. 15 Duncan, ed. (1995); all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to LW. 16 White (1993), pp.39-41. 17 Parry (1983), p. 2. 18 Ibid., p.1. 19 Green (1979), p.313. 20 Morel to Doyle, 7 October 1909, in Louis and Stengers, eds. (1968), p.205.


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enrolled a band of runaway slaves in his service, armed them, and conducted a campaign, which ended by his killing with his own hands the notorious half-breed and breaking down the system which he represented.

The Lost World, p. 58

Heart of Darkness had indicated more than a decade previously that “to tear treasure out of the

bowels of the land [...] with no moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking

into a safe” (HoD, 30) was predominantly a concern of European imperialists, and yet this

passage persists in constructing racial hierarchies by typecasting “villainous half-castes” in the

role of exploiters. Kurtz, who in Heart of Darkness gets a “tribe to follow him” (HoD, 56) in order

to “raid the country” (HoD, 55), is here replaced by a glorified English aristocrat who, when

taking upon himself the role of “Red Chief” (LW, 57), does not allow “ivory [or rubber to get]

the better of less material aspirations” (HoD, 57). On the contrary, even when “killing with his

own hands”, his actions are authorized by an implied reader, who acknowledges his “formal[...]

war”. Roxton’s self-assigned role of moral crusader is justified in the reader’s tacit recognition

that his judgment is faultless: he is “one of us” - culturally superior - and the natives inevitably

view him as “their champion and protector” (LW, 57). In Heart of Darkness, by contrast, we are

presented with a hero who holds an “ugly... humanity” (HoD, 36) in common with the natives,

and whose superiority is guaranteed only through fire-power: “They adored him [...] What can

you expect! [...] he came to them with thunder and lightning, you know” (HoD, 56). A vicious

circle is exposed: European military domination can no longer be justified with reference to

“cultural superiority”, since the only evidence of such “superiority” is in military domination.

Heart of Darkness, however, failed to impact the fictional smokescreen behind which the

European could achieve “the full realization of [his] own, phantom-like existence”; the space

constructed by writers like Rider Haggard as “Kuakuanaland”; the archetypal African kingdom

behind “a gigantic gateway [...] shaped exactly like a woman’s breasts” (KSM, 57), which

invited the imperial subject to release his animalistic drives in “the spirit of play”: “Blood! blood!

blood! rivers of blood; blood everywhere” (KSM, 94). Misapprehensions over Conrad’s ironic

use of this fictional “fantasy... universe” are to blame, I believe, for disparaging criticism of

Heart of Darkness ever since Achebe’s famous claim that the author was a “bloody racist”.21 And

yet, a few enlightened readers have always been able to see the irony of Kurtz as an “‘emissary

of light’ armed to the teeth”, and to view Conrad’s portrayal of “‘subject races’” within the

quotation marks of a “bloody racist” discourse which, in his other work, is explicitly avoided.22

Ultimately, it is the fact that Kurtz, like Nietzsche, indulges in “the inconceivable mystery of a

soul that [knows] no restraint, no faith, and no fear” that causes his madness; the madness of a

soul “struggling blindly with itself” (HoD, 66) in its knowledge that, for all its animalism,

humanity is unable to escape the “consciousness” that forbids it a Darwinian perspective:

Yes, Egoism is good [...] and fidelity to nature would be best of all [...] if we could only get rid of consciousness [...] To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this

21 Achebe (1977) pp.1783-1794 (1789). 22 Garnett (1902), pp.131-33 (132).


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earth is very well - but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife - the tragedy begins. We can’t return to nature, since we can’t change our place in it”.

Conrad to Cunninghame Graham (31, January, 1898)

Kurtz “dying words are an outcry against himself - against his betrayal of civilization”;23 his

story is the “tragedy” of a failed “return to nature”, to “crimes committed in the spirit of play”,

to the world of “savages” constructed by “adventure fiction”, but revealed in Heart of Darkness

to be a figment of the European imagination. As such, the tragedy is not achieved at the

expense of the African native, since “native life” is not even present in Heart of Darkness - a

novella in which the author “wanted to focus on the Europeans” - as it is in works like

Almayer’s Folly and Lord Jim.24 In his first novel, for example, Conrad “demystifies accepted late

nineteenth-century distinctions between primitive and civilised by replicating in the Malay and

Arab society the kind of social hierarchies that we mistakenly believe to be an implicit part of

Western civilization”.25 Whereas Heart of Darkness traces the degeneration of Africans and

Europeans in a Darwinian world “outside all social restraint and hypocrisy”, Almayer’s Folly “is

the site of a much more complex cultural negotiation”26 between various cultures - Dutch, Arab,

Sulu, Dyak, Chinese, Siamese, Balinese - but more importantly, between the humanity which

embodies these cultures, and “Sambir [...] an inchoate form that can be controlled neither by

man’s endeavours nor by his imagination”.27 In its delineation of a space in which Europe

features only as a dream, or occasionally as the fleeting manifestation of authority, the novel

thus forms an important counterpart to the work which was to follow, where the dream, unlike

Almayer’s immediate social and cultural surroundings, is shown to be “hollow at the core”

(HoD, 58).

In the Author’s Note to Almayer’s Folly a distinction is drawn between the horizontal relationship

of “common mortals” who share “the curse of facts and the blessing of illusion”, and the

vertical perspective of those like Kurtz whose “sympathies are (probably) with the immortals:

with the angels above or the devils below”.28 The latter are the European übermenschen who seek

to realize their dreams by moulding the “colonial universe” into the object of their desires, but

whose “phantom-like existence” fails to be realized in light of their Darwinian impotence.

Almayer’s “dream of [a] splendid future”, for example, gives way to “the unpleasant realities of

the present hour” (Almayer, 3) within the novel’s first sentence, while Lingard, whose trilogy

opens by recounting his demise, “return[s to Sambir] aged, ill, a ghost of his former self” (21).

Almayer’s case is particularly interesting, since his failure is everywhere attributed to his social

isolation. Although he is initially portrayed as a victim of the “unscrupulous intrigues and [...]

fierce trade competition [of the] Arabs” (20), it is made clear as the novel progresses that his

23 Brantlinger (1988), p. 270. 24 Hawkins (1982), pp.163-71. 25 Schwarz (1980), p. 17. 26 Hampson (2000), p. 101. 27 Schwarz (1980), p. 4. 28 Mallios, ed. (2002), p.xxviii; all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to Almayer.


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own racism is the most significant obstacle to his integration into Sambir’s social network,

beginning with his refusal of Reshid’s marriage proposal to Nina. The principle that social “love

is greater than...” (152) “all refinements... all sensibilities... all wisdom” (xxviii) is consistently

sacrificed by Almayer to his sense of “closeness [with] men who share the same colour of skin”,

to his “idea of his duty to himself - to his race” (152); a sense of racial solidarity that has been

undermined throughout the novel by the Dutch, who view “the Arabs [as] better subjects than

[this particular] Hollander” (29). By contrast, Nina refuses to “dream [her father’s] dreams [...]

of life amongst [...] white faces” after having been “cast out from their midst in angry

contempt”, responding only to “the murmur... of love” (141). As one who has experienced “the

narrow mantle” of her first (European) culture “fall away and leave her shivering and helpless

as if on the edge of some deep and unknown abyss”, it is natural that Nina should affirm a

sense of belonging to a “decidedly assimilatory” culture29 - “I am a Malay!” - and return “scorn

for scorn, contempt of contempt, hate for hate” to those who had rejected her because of “her

mixed blood” (33, 141). The hollowness of “self-realization”, in this novel, is exposed not

exclusively with reference to its “horror”, as in Heart of Darkness, but by contrasting those “who

possess no heart” (xxviii) with those whose “latent feeling of fellowship with all creation”

(Preface to the Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’)30 leads teleologically to the vindication of social solidarity,

in the conventional ending of a happy marriage.

The qualification to such a reading of Almayer’s Folly lies in Conrad’s use of terms like “savage”,

and in his “complete ignorance of Malays and their habits”,31 objections which are not limited

to modern readers, but which need to be tempered by a historical perspective on questions of

“race, ethnicity [and] nationality”.32 Given that Conrad’s own knowledge was “limited by the

nature of his calling [...] with all it implie[d] of brief contacts with land and people”,33 his

capacity to generate interest in “the standpoint of the natives” among his readers remains both

unique and remarkable.34 Through the genre of imaginative romance in Almayer’s Folly -

European though it may have been in origin - Conrad was able to dramatize dialogically “the

antagonism between western modes and foreign precepts as conflict of authentic

alternatives”,35 and to stage the failure of a modern European, self-assertive and individualist

culture in the face of Bornean multi-cultural solidarity. This theme is explored further in Lord

Jim, where the alternatives are counterposed in the novel’s bipartite structure, and the

eponymous hero placed in the privileged position of experiencing both. Initially, like Kurtz,

“his thoughts [are] full of valorous deeds [...] dreams and the success of his imaginary

29 Hampson (2000), p. 13. 30 Gorra (2007), p. 48; all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to Preface. 31 Clifford H., ‘Mr. Joseph Conrad at Home and Abroad’, Singapore Free Press, September 1898, cited in Hampson (2000), p. 5. 32 Firchow (2000), p.1. 33 Sherry (1996), pp.319-358 (319). 34 Anonymous, (1900), pp. 394-396 (395). 35 Parry (1983), pp. 1-2.


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achievements”;36 an image of “self-realization” inculcated in him through the solitary act of

reading “a course of light holiday literature” (4). Expectations constructed by the übermenschen

of “adventure fiction”, however, are soon encountered in the form of a culture which relies for

its own realization on the capacity of individuals “to look temptations straight in the face [... to

sustain] an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the inward and outward terrors [...] backed

by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts [...] to the solicitation of ideas” (32). Jim is

required to gaze into the Nietzschean abîme with nothing to sustain him but his own “ego-

ideal”,37 and when he fails to uphold “the parentage of his kind” he is accused of “criminal

weakness”, condemned to being “overwhelmed, confounded, pierced through and through,

squirming like an impaled beatle” (32). In Patusan, by contrast, Jim is “loved, trusted, admired”

(127), and as a result is able “to love the land and the people with a sort of fierce egoism” (180)

in his affirmation of reciprocal social gratification. As such, he does not “regress[...] to a

mythical mode” but actively chooses to “break away from the ethical relativism of modernity”

by integrating himself in another, contemporary culture, and establishing a loving interracial

relationship in a community where the peaceful co-existence of different ethnic groups has

become the germ of prosperity.38 The enduring irony of this picture, however, is its transience.

Jim is revisited by an allegorical figure of his old culture, Gentleman Brown, whose animalistic

“desire[...] to wreak havoc with the jungle town [and] to see it strewn with corpses” (270) causes

the citizens of Patusan to view him as an inhuman threat, and to “proclaim “that between

[them] and the white men on the hill [...] there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no

peace” (273). Jim is finally torn between two paradoxical choices: the self-preservational act of

murder which, justified by the inhumanity of the white man, would simultaneously degrade

him to the level of a Darwinian Brown and deny his own humanity as a white man; or the act of

social solidarity ultimately chosen by Jim as the only logical conclusion to his newly-adopted

communal ethic, but which confers the right of existence to a genocidal culture which views

“native life” as the mere “play of shadows”.

The meeting between Jim and Brown is a meeting between a “gentleman and [a] criminal” who

share “not only [...] the same colour of skin” but a common cultural background; Jim “identifies

himself with Brown”, and therefore must acknowledge the man whose race and culture are his

own: “He simply cannot resist the evil because the evil is within himself”.39 Because of the cultural

baggage of European democracy and moral relativism, moreover, Jim cannot claim the absolute

authority needed to pass judgment on “a man who carries right - the abstract thing - within the

envelope of his common desires” (LJ, 295). The only means of vindication are twofold: firstly, he

must purge the world of the sins of European imperialism in a Christ-like negation of his own

existence; and secondly, he must establish a social “intimacy” within Europe that “functions as

36 Berthoud, ed. (2002), p. 15; all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to LJ. 37 Erdinast-Vulcan (1991), p. 38. 38 Ibid., pp.24-5, 35. 39 Guerard (1958), p.150.


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an escape, an alternative, or even as a counterforce to the public attitudes of [modern] society in

general”.40 As such, Jim’s tragedy is not a failed “regression to a mythical mode”, nor is Patusan

a model of a “simpler, more decisive, more hierarchical life of feudal[ism in a] pre-industrial

age [...] attractively free of moral complexity”.41 Rather more simply, Lord Jim is an appeal to the

“conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts” (Preface, 48), a

protest against the “horror and laughter” of Gentleman Brown, a warning that “the almost

inevitable trajectory of Social Darwinism [is] genocide”,42 and the expression of a belief that no

culture should, “with a consciousness of superiority freeing their hands from all moral bonds,

[be] anxious to take up [...] the ‘perfect man’s burden’” (Poland Re-visited).43 The Christian

echoes in Jim’s self-sacrifice, combined with the reader’s sympathy for him, suggest that there is

something more than ressentiment in a culture of humility and self-denial. More importantly, the

way in which our sympathy is procured and propagated capitalizes on the “strongest and most

universal form of solidarity which remains in modern society”,44 conveyed microcosmically in

the friendship between Jim and Marlow, but also (in the guise of oral narration) alluding to the

literary community which English novelists had traditionally appealed to in the name of social

solidarity. This goes some way to explain Conrad’s despair over “the fact that, despite being

hailed by the critics as an important writer of established reputation and authority, he remained

largely unknown to the wider public” until the publication of Chance.45 It also reflects the

untimeliness of Conrad’s attempt to yoke together, structurally, the relativist implications of a

“text [that] does not permit the reader to decide among alternative possibilities”46 in its first

half, and the “saving illusion” of a self-sacrificial hero in the second, since these elements had

already been separated into “two distinct cultural spheres, that of ‘high’ culture and that of

‘mass’ culture”.47

Marlow’s audience is divided, as a result, into a modernist intellectual elite on the one hand,

satisfied by an incomplete narrative that “made discussion vain and comment impossible” (LJ,

245) - showing moreover no interest in the redemptive self-sacrifice of “him that survived the

telling of his story” (246) - and the “privileged man” on the other, to whom Brown represents a

scourge of racial weakness: “giving your life up to them (them meaning all of mankind with

skins brown, yellow, or black in colour) [is] like selling your soul to a brute” (246). Conrad’s

response to these attitudes took shape in his political novels, where moral indifference and

contempt for human life are targeted introspectively towards Europe, and deprived of the

“native [...] backdrop” that had previously “lent these ghostlike events a seeming guarantee

against all consequences”. In The Secret Agent, for example, the character referred to as the

40 Watt (1980), p.336. 41 White (1993), p.88-9. 42 Hawkins (1982), pp.163-71 (170). 43 Conrad (1949), p.147. 44 Watt (1980), p.336. 45 Najder (2007), pp.332, 348. 46 Miller (1982), p.35. 47 Jameson (1983), p.207.


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Assistant Commissioner is described as having begun “his career [...] in a tropical colony

[where] he had been very successful in tracking and breaking up certain nefarious secret

societies amongst the natives”.48 Here, as in Heart of Darkness, colonial administration is a

question of arbitrarily defining the “nefarious”, the “criminal” and the “rebellious” with

reference to one’s own authority, in contrast to “the near presence of that strange emotional

phenomenon called public opinion” whose “irrational nature” (SA, 449-50) dictates social

existence in Europe. This “boomerang effect”, whereby the autocratic values of returning

colonials recoil upon a European system ”dependent on too many subordinates and too many

masters” (449), is reflected also in the Professor’s reactions to the the burden of social

responsibility and moral relativism. His greatest fear is

the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers [...] thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps.

The Secret Agent, p. 436.

Paradoxically, this fear arises when a democratic notion, that the “sentiment” and “logic” of the

individual should mitigate “the atrocious injustices of society” (435), is defeated by the

“mechanistic government by the mob, with an inbuilt tendency to autocracy”.49 The fear is only

coherent, however, when “mankind [...] in its numbers” is homogenized into a “thoughtless

mass” and juxtaposed as an “impervious” and “blind” antagonist to the individual. The

Professor’s self-magnification is, on this count, a perfect foil to Stevie, whose instinctive

empathy for each individual horse and cabby, though marginalized as mentally defective, is

formulated in a judgment that values each man equally: “Bad world for poor people” (502).

Although this principle is undermined by Verloc’s violent act of self-preservation, it is to some

extent redeemed when the tragic implications of his murder are pursued to their logical

conclusion: Verloc’s own right to “open proofs of sympathy and affection” from his wife are

forfeited; Winnie is “released from all earthly ties” and set “free” to murder her husband (559-

561); and the circle is brought to a close when the absence of social relations, of her family, of

Ossipon even, causes her final, suicidal act of despair.

The disintegration of this family, focussed as it is upon the “stubborn indestructibility of matter,

symbolized by the tell-tale surviving pieces of Stevie’s flesh”,50 and recounted by a narrator

who refuses to acknowledge the inhuman criminality of his characters (he states, for instance,

that “Mr Verloc was a humane man” [546], that “he was excusable” [557]) represents

microcosmically the implications of “not possibly [being able to] comprehend the value of

Stevie” (546), of another human being, beyond his material function. Marlow had already

examined this attitude in an African context, but his synthesizing, human vision is here

replaced by the ironic distance of an omniscient narrator, whose insensitivity inverts the

48 Gorra (2007), pp.372-603 (449); all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to SA. 49 Najder (1976), pp.77-89 (81). 50 Eagleton (1978), pp.158-167 (161).


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device’s conventional moralizing function, representing rather the indifference of an amoral

universe. Conrad’s “unreliable” narrators are often preferable precisely for this reason, that

they are human and capable of empathy, as in the case Amy Foster.51 In this short masterpiece,

we are given the “native life” of provincial England in all its cultural myopia, including its

responses to a racially and culturally different outsider: “a horrid-looking man”, “a hairy sort of

gipsy fellow”, “a funny tramp”, “an escaped lunatic” (AF, 231-2). But the story is redeemed by a

narrator whose experiences as “the companion of a famous traveller” (222) have left him open

to feelings of compassion for all humankind. His empathy takes its most remarkable form in the

use of Free Indirect Discourse, whereby Yanko’s words find their way into his language, which

both represents and validates the stranger’s perspective:

There was a steam-machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it packed tight [...] They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a great house on the water. The walls were smooth and black, and there uprose [...] bare trees in the shape of crosses, extremely high.

Amy Foster, p. 233.

The virtuosity of this description is not only in the way it “translates” Yanko’s first-time

experience of a steamboat, a sailboat and its masts, but also in the way the doctor, through his

very style, is able to “inhabit” Yanko’s consciousness and trace the logical thought processes of

a culturally different human being. The doctor’s “unappeasable curiosity which believes that

there is a particle of a general truth in every mystery” (222) produces, like Marlow’s friendship

with Jim, a sense that human solidarity and understanding transcend the cultural barriers that

otherwise lead to the “fate so simply tragic” of Yanko. Unlike the omniscient narrator of The

Secret Agent, whose “unitary language [...] work[s] toward [the] concrete verbal and ideological

unification and centralization” of bourgeois materialism, Dr. Kennedy, who inhabits the very

story he is narrating, “is an active participant in [...] speech diversity” or “heteroglossia [...] the

uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification”.52

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s conditional mode allows him to imagine what would happen “if

a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling

on the road between Deal and Gravesend” (19-20), adopting an African perspective in the way

that Conrad, through his empathetic narrators, was able to adopt an English one. The virtue of

such double vision, however, was increasingly challenged by readers’ reception of “that

something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public... Foreignness I suppose”.53 This

sense of cultural and political displacement contributed to a personal crisis, during which the

cynical narrators of Nostromo and The Secret Agent were born, but which ultimately culminated

in a psychological breakdown following the composition of Under Western Eyes. In this novel,

the familiar device of a cosmopolitan, English narrator is reversed such that the “teacher of

51 Gorra (2007), pp. 221-249; all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to AF. 52 Bakhtin (1934-35), pp.1190-1220 (1198-1199) 53 Conrad to Galsworthy, 6 January 1908, cited in Najder (2007), p.380.


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languages”, although he “understands all the words”, “does not understand the situation”.54

“Words”, we are told, are “fatal to the imagination [...] and man appears a mere talking animal

not much more wonderful than a parrot” (6). The suggestion, here, is that linguistic expression

is emptied of social meaning, and that the nightmare of “solitary individuality” (12), explored

so vividly in the earlier novels, has been realized: “no two human beings understand each

other. They understand but their own voices” (Almayer, 141). Razumov, like Marlow, is “looked

upon as [...] an altogether trustworthy man” (UWE, 7), but this confidant scorns the appeal of

individual humanity, preferring to gaze on “an almost physical impression of endless space and

countless millions” (30). His willingness to use people as symbols for the sake of his own self-

preservation offers, of course, a direct parallel to Conrad’s picture of a nation “sat upon the

gravestone of autocracy, cutting off from air, from light, from all knowledge themselves and of

the world, the buried millions of Russian people” (Autocracy and War).55 There is clear echo,

here, of the voices of persecuted parents and a partitioned homeland, but it must have been

even more bitter for Conrad to recognize the lack of sympathy from his adopted nation,

represented by the “teacher of languages” in Geneva. To the protagonists, the man who

confidently proclaims that “one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity” (UWE, 88)

“virtually ceases to exist” (286); his failure to understand them is the symptom of a “self-

imposed process of withdrawal and repression”, a principle of “non-interference” characteristic

of the Genevan democracy, and leads to an inhuman incapacity to recognize that he has “much

in common with the apparently incomprehensible protagonist of his story [...] both are, of

course, in love with Nathalie Haldin.”56

Denying responsibility for the lives of others, it would seem, implies the renunciation of one’s

own right to be loved. This is true for the narrator as it is for Razumov, which is why the latter

“is drawn towards the truth, both in terms of revealing it and perceiving it”, “whenever he is

with an interlocutor”.57 Razumov’s realization that he has “no one anywhere in the whole great

world [to] go to” (291) coupled with the discovery that “he needed her” (286), a confidante,

eventually leads to confession - the only possible resolution of the novel - whereby his sins are

expiated through physical suffering, and the foundations laid for his redemptive relationship

with Tekla. It also signals the return of Conrad’s “confessional mode” in Chance, where Marlow,

although “radically different [...] a cynical, often callous narrator”,58 still inspires enough

confidence to receive Flora’s confessions, to forge a friendship with Powell, and to orchestrate a

complex, multi-perspectival narrative that ends in a hopeful relationship between a young man

and woman. As Conrad recovered from a “a complete nervous break-down... that had been

54 Stephen Donovan, ed. (2007), pp.6, 90, 88; all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to UWE. 55 Gorra (2007), pp.624-5. 56 Erdinast-Vulcan (1991), pp.121, 124. 57 Hawthorn (1979), p.107. 58 Erdinast-Vulcan (1991), p. 154.


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coming for months”,59 then, he also gradually returned to the pervasive themes of Victory,

where the “backdrop of native life” is reinstated, to illumine once more the “ghost-like events”

of European life. Conrad’s last masterpiece reintroduces us to “the gentleman and the

criminal”, in the guise of Jones and Ricardo, both of whom view “native life as a mere play of

shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded

in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and needs”.60 This “evil intelligence”, “instinctive

savagery” and “brute force” is precisely what Heyst wishes to escape in his decision to “drift

altogether and literally, body and soul[. But the] next day, when he [sees] the girl called Alma,

she [...] leav[es] a profound impression, a secret touch on the heart” (V, 74). Like Razumov,

Heyst discovers a “soul” in the woman, “Alma”, that he cannot live without, and through her

self-sacrifice, realizes that this “world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit

of play” is not to be escaped from, but to be shared even in death; for “fire purifies everything”

(321), leaving the lovers “profoundly at peace” and ready to inhabit “the sanctuary of [their]

innermost heart - for ever!” (318). In the meantime, while the ground is being razed for the

reconstruction of European belief-systems, Wang “asserts his agency”. “In a noticeable reversal

of the colonial position, [he] ‘annexes’ both Heysts keys and his guns”, contributes to the defeat

of Jones and Ricardo, and “finally, when all the Europeans are dead [...] [acquires] possession of

the Diamond Bay settlement”.61

The fact that Wang’s restitution coincides with Heyst’s dying words - “woe to the man whose

heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life!” (320) - is a

testament to Conrad’s generous vision of a redeemed universe, and the novel’s final word -

“nothing” - a reminder of the “Oriental philosophy [that] sees age-old collective tranquility in

the face of emptiness, and a refreshing willingness on behalf of the individual to embrace

annihilation”.62 Conrad’s masterful appropriation of an Oriental perspective in short stories like

Falk has been proficiently examined by William Bonney in Thorns & Arabesques and, given more

space, this essay would analyze its further implications in Conrad’s sea stories: The Nigger of the

‘Narcissus’, the Shadow-Line and Typhoon. These virtuosic pieces have been neglected, also,

because their action is limited to the decks of a ship, and when “native life” intrudes upon the

stage - as in the case of James Wait - it is swiftly incorporated into a struggle for survival that

has nothing “ghost-like” about it. As such, Nostromo remains the novel most conspicuous by its

absence, since this is where we encounter human illusions in all their forms, from Gould’s

“faith in material interests” (Nostromo, 87), to Nostromo’s “poverty, his exploits, his adventures,

his loves, and his reputation” (206), all of which are undermined as the novel progresses.

Decoud, who “los[es] belief in the reality of his action past and to come” is the apogee of the

Conradian inability “to grapple with [one]self” (377) and thus reflects the deep pessimism into

59 Najder (2007), p. 411. 60 Mallios, ed. (2003), p. 131; all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text, abbreviated to V. 61 Hampson (2000), p. 157. 62 Bonney (1980), pp.10-11.


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which the author had descended during the writing of his political novels. But even here, a

character like Monygham can be applauded for his “iron constitution” in surviving “mental

and bodily anguish” (290), and the “darkness of [a] grave-like prison” (291), in order to settle

his “great fund of loyalty [...] all on Mrs Gould’s head” (292). Even in Conrad’s darkest

moment, therefore, it seems clear that there is an “existence” behind reality, which is more than

just the “phantom-like ... play of shadows”. In holding that existence in common, Conrad seems

to say, we can “banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all

virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark”.63

63 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, cited in Bonney (1980), p. 8.

Documents

Conrad - Final