Joseph Conrad, The Malay Archipelago, And the Decadent Hero

8/2/2019 Joseph Conrad, The Malay Archipelago, And the Decadent Hero

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Joseph Conrad, the Malay Archipelago, and the Decadent HeroAuthor(s): Marialuisa BignamiSource: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 38, No. 150 (May, 1987), pp. 199-210Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/515423

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JOSEPH CONRAD, THEMALAY ARCHIPELAGO, AND THEDECADENT HEROBy MARIALUISA BIGNAMI

DURING his sea-going life Joseph Conrad spent only a very shorttime in the geographical area he himself defines as 'the region of theIndian Ocean, with its offshoots and prolongations north of theEquator even as far as the Gulf of Siam';1 yet possibly sixteen2 of hisnovels and short stories make use of this area for their location orbackground. It is the purpose of this paper to attempt to show thatso peculiar is the region's character that it gradually was to becomea metaphor for the set of values with which Conrad endows hischaracters.The 'offshoots' of this region may reach as far north as the Gulf ofSiam or as far west as Mauritius, but for Conrad its core is the MalayArchipelago, the whole area pivoting on Singapore, which Conradconsistently calls 'an Eastern port', as if he were afraid of committinghimself by naming such an obvious spot on the map of the BritishEmpire.Conrad never really stated his attitude to the British Empire and allwe know about it must be inferred by contrasting it with his attitudeto Belgian imperialism in the Congo or to more 'subtle' forms ofimperialism as portrayed in some of the so-called 'political' novels.3One may of course maintain that he never dealt with the BritishEmpire in detail, just as with British politics at large, because he wastrying to get himself accepted as a citizen and an author by Britainand therefore needed all the benevolence he could summon from hisfoster country. But such a view does not give sufficient weight to thesubtle insight into the world of moral values which was his constantconcern and which had little to do either with political ideas ingeneral or with the specific politics governing one vast community.The purpose of this paper is not to deal with Conrad's attitude to

1 Author's Note to 'Twixt Land and Sea. In Victory (p. 7) the region is defined as 'Roughlyspeaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn around a point in North Borneo... It just touched Manila ... It just touched Saigon.'2 'Karain', 'The Lagoon', 'The Planter of Malata', 'Because of the Dollars', Almayer's Folly,The Rescue,An Outcast of the Islands, Victory, 'Youth', 'The End of the Tether', The ShadowLine, 'A Smile of Fortune', 'The Secret Sharer', 'Freya of the Seven Isles', 'Falk', LordJim.3 Mainly Nostromo. See also E. K. Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (Chicago,I963).RES New Series, Vol. XXXVIII,No. 150 (1987) ? OxfordUniversity ressI987


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200 BIGNAMI: JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAYimperialism, but to examine the metaphoric use he makes of a par-ticular geographical location for narrative purposes. The character ofthis area as Conrad knew it is nevertheless connected with the historyof colonial expansion, and this issue will therefore be taken into con-sideration for its function in Conrad's narratives.

Conrad's first contact with the East was his disastrous voyage onthe Palestine, but I feel that his decision, mirrored in Jim's, to takeup a berth in the local service after being dismissed from hospitalin Singapore is the really significant episode: after having had, so tospeak, a taste of the East-albeit a bitter one-in 1882, Conrad seemsto have decided in 1887 to explore it at length, serving as second mateon the Vidar. In the intervening years he had had glimpses of theworld that lay beyond and around Singapore, had certainly heardmuch about it in sailors' yarns and-one may suppose-must havefelt attracted by territories in which every man seemed to count forhimself.4

Although not an area to which Europeans were foreign, the MalayArchipelago lay outside formal colonial rule during the years ofConrad's travelling through and around it,5 yet each successive effortat colonization had left behind some of its own men and customs:Portuguese, Arab, and Dutch had intermingled with local popula-tions, themselves migrating and in turn overpowering each other.On the eve of Conrad's first encounter with the area, the Dutch andthe English had worked out an agreement about its commercialexploitation and its general 'policing', and the labours of this agree-ment can clearly be seen in the events depicted in Almayer's Folly.6

4 Conrad's mood about these territories is probably best revealed in his later works, e.g. inHeyst's exclamation 'I am enchanted with these islands' (Victory, p. 7). See my treatment ofVictory, below, for this point.5 I am not referring particularly to the Vidar period here, but to Conrad's seagoing years ingeneral.6 Although the Arabs had slowly been moving to this region and between the seventh andfifteenth centuries establishing their own sultanates, which survived into Conrad's days, thePortuguese were the first European colonists in it and they ruled unrivalled over it for the wholeof the sixteenth century. The seventeenth century saw the Dutch move into the region and theirposition there was challenged in turn by the British during the eighteenth century. In the sameperiod the French, having lost the bid for India to Britain, also tried to settle in South-East Asiaand ended by getting possession of the Indo-Chinese peninsula, on the margin of Conrad's'East'. Spain, too, had its own settlement in South-East Asia, but in the Philippines, quiteoutside Conrad's Eastern locations. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, with thePortuguese in control only of Timor, the actual Malay Archipelago was under British andDutch influence; which meant that they charged local 'rajahs' with collecting taxes, sold,under monopoly, cheap European manufactured goods, induced the farming of useful 'exotic'crops, and developed mining. For these last two activities they were compelled to import largeamounts of labourfrom India and China: whereas the Indians went back, the Chinese stayed onin the Malay Archipelago and made the racial scene even more varied and complicated. Fordetails on the colonial situation here briefly outlined see: G. C. Allen and A. G. Donnithorne,Western Enterprises in Indonesia and Malaya (London, I957); J. Kennedy, A History of


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ARCHIPELAGO, AND THE DECADENT HERO 201This arrangement is much in line with one of the traditional tenets ofthe colonial attitude of the British, their peculiar attitude to relation-ships with overseas territories: it was not until the final decades of thenineteenth century that Britain was reconciled to the idea of actuallyruling over vast territories such as India and the African colonies.Britain had, however, taken care to establish a network of key portsthrough which a profitable commerce of buying raw materials andselling manufactured products could be conducted. This sort ofprocedure did not burden the mother-country with a costly andtroublesome administration, nor did it appear properly 'colonial'-inthe sense in which the Spanish Empire had been in South America-in that it did not interfere with the local population's traditions ingovernment, language, and religion.This institutional and economic background does not seem to havebeen of interest to Conrad in the least; what was of interest to him wasthe human environment resulting from such a situation in which,alongside merchants conducting their business correctly, were to befound all sorts of misfits and outcasts, men who were to become theLingards and the Steins, the romantic adventurers in the writings ofthis aristocratic Polish expatriate.Conrad had had a chequered and stimulating education and youth,had of his own choice disciplined himself in his early maturity byserving faithfully and professionally in the British merchant navy,but had never grasped-and never was to grasp-a faith and a cer-tainty which were foreign not so much to his personal backgroundas to the cultural and artistic context in which he was to work as heturned from sailor to writer. It is as a Decadent artist, then, thatConrad looks back on the sort of men he met while sailing in the East,as well as on the settlements that made their life and activitiespossible, and realizes that only in such a place could the desperateand faithless men of his imaginative world live and thrive. They aredesperate, I would like to emphasize, not because they have lost faithin any political or religious ideal, nor because they are legally outsidecivilized society-which they often are-but because they have cometo believe that no faith or ideal exists.No inherited frame of mind or set of values seem to Conrad worthpursuing, and appropriately the characters of his Eastern stories areoften social misfits or downright legal offenders, such as Lingard, apoor boy from an English fishing village but a 'king' in the East, orJim, who has abandoned his ship; no one will ask them embarrassingMalaya, I400-I959 (New York, 1962); J. Bastin and H. J. Benda, A History of ModernSouth-east Asia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968); C. P. Fitzgerald, A ConciseHistory of East Asia (NewYork-Washington, I966).


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202 BIGNAMI: JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAYquestions in an Eastern port, but none the less they will never findpeace. Their quest is inevitably going to end as Kurtz's does: in whathas become the locus classicus in which to look for Conrad's philo-sophical statements-Heart of Darkness-we learn that at the endof a whole lifetime of probing into the heart of darkness, of burningoneself up in a see-saw of noble and base motives, all that one findsis 'The horror, the horror!' For the purposes of his characterization,issues are nevertheless too clear-cut in the Congo: Conrad makes useof this location in order to give vent to his disgust and suffering at thesight of cruel and crude colonial exploitation, but it will never servethe purpose of a subtle moral and psychological analysis, it will neverturn into the mirror image of defeated Western man.Neither Almayer nor Willems is credited by their author with sofine a consciousness as Kurtz, and only Axel Heyst can be said to per-ceive the vanity of a doomed quest; but Almayer's covering up Nina'sfootsteps in the sand and drugging himself to death constitute asdesperate a gesture as that of the most refined and artistic Decadentsoul in Europe. Thus when Conrad, steeped as he was in the readingof French novelists and poets, put pen to paper, it was to the memoryof what was to become Almayer, or Willems, or Lingard, that heturned as the symbols of the condition of man as he had learnt tounderstand it in the world of life and art which surrounded him. Theworld of set values-which one could conform to, or rebel against, orsimply transgress-a world whose objective existence outside man'smind could be taken for granted and which could therefore be safelyknown and reproduced in art, in a word the world of the Victorians,was not for him. His artistic memory started by going back to theMalay Archipelago at the beginning of his writing career, in the veryearly 89gos, and never ceased to do so for decades to come, almost tothe end of his life.

Conrad's effort at defining the moral world of his characters thusmakes use of, and becomes peculiarly involved with, a clear historicaland geographical situation; his efforts being sustained, as they are, byhis mastery of realistic narrative technique. Nothing is vague or justhinted at in Conrad's fiction, as is witnessed by the amount ofnautical terms and manoeuvres, which must have embarrassed evencontemporary readers, let alone modern ones, possibly less familiarwith the details of sail-navigation. In what we shall call his 'Easternstories', the same procedure is applied to the world of land, or ofinland waters, the sea repeatedly becoming a symbol of escape fromambiguous situations. Well-known examples of this are the back-ground situations to 'Falk' and The Shadow Line, and it is also hintedat in 'The Secret Sharer', but Almayer too, watching a floating tree,


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ARCHIPELAGO, AND THE DECADENT HERO 203'began to wonder how far out to sea it would drift' (p. 4);7 and to him'the present misery of burning sun, of muddy and malodorous riverbank disappeared in a gorgeous vision of a splendid future' (p. 62).The inland world-the rivers, forests, clearings, settlements, andcompounds-thus becomes a backdrop to these stories in a wealth ofdescription that has rightly been seen as overwhelming by a numberof critics. Yet, if we bear with the initial pages of Almayer's Folly andsuch obvious outspoken symbolism as the floating tree with its out-stretched arm of a branch, we are rewarded with descriptions suchas that of Almayer's efforts at keeping up a European white man'sidentity by means of his poor yet cherished furniture and table-ware,or of Nina's cot as the only piece of furniture in the middle of herroom, in An Outcast of the Islands. A colonial situation and an actualrisk run by white men outside their native environment of lapsinginto some sort of savagery are here depicted: but whereas the Englishmerchant in India, for instance, could refer for support and re-assurance to a public structure or to institutions modelled on the oneson which he had been raised, Almayer and Jim can turn nowhere forhelp from the slowly creeping jungle of strangeness, of decay anddeath surrounding them. Perhaps more pointedly than anywhereelse, the particular function of the Malay setting is made clear in thevery title of Conrad's first novel and in the event which accounts forits first obvious meaning, the building of the house in which towelcome hoped-for British officials. The house itself, as well as theefforts spent on planning and building it, are described at length:Almayer began building his new house for the use of the future engineers,agents, or settlers of the new [British Borneo] Company. He spent everyavailable guilder on it with a confident heart .... the grey-headed and foolishdreamer invited his guests to visit his new house ... in the great emptyrooms where the tepid wind entering through the sashless windows whirledgently the dried leaves and the dust of many days of neglect, Almayer. . . stamped his foot to show the solidity of the neatly-fitting floors andexpatiated upon the beauties and convenience of the building ... the halffinished house built for the reception of Englishmen received on thatjoyousnight the name of 'Almayer's Folly' by the unanimous vote of the light-hearted [Dutch] seamen. (pp. 33, 35-7)

The proud building is presented to us in its hopeful prime onlyhalf-way through the novel when its doomed fate is already wellknown to the reader from the dismal setting of the initial scene. Itwas folly on Almayer's part, we perceive from the very beginning, tohope for a saving force to come from outside, because no such thing

7 Page numbers throughout are from the Uniform Edition of J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.


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204 BIGNAMI: JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAYexists: to the Dutchman born in a botanic garden and doomed to diein ajungle the England which may symbolize order and salvation willforever be a forbidden land. Not only will it never be the backdrop ofNina's social triumphs, but even such dubious substitutes for it as theDutch fleet or Tom Lingard will not be at hand: the one only brieflyand derisively sailing up the Pantai, the other not even getting nearthe island. Left to fend for himself, Almayer fails, as Willems haddone before him. And where could this failure be properly staged ifnot in Sambir, the settlement over which British and Dutch, Araband Malay influences are periodically felt, but over which no singlenationality seeks to establish its permanent authority. It is a generalscene of decay and dereliction from which young people duly flee.As soon as Almayer's Folly was ready for the press, Conrad felt anurgent need to explain at length and justify to his readers the roots ofso dismal a plight as Almayer's. It was thus that Willems's betrayalbecame the subject of his next novel. Time and again Conrad wouldgo back to the issue of loyalty and betrayal, in 'Karain, A Memory' aswell as in the first attempt at telling Lingard's story, 'The Rescuer'.The issue crops up again and again in all the 'sea stories' (with vary-ing degrees of success or failure) from The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' toLord Jim (and the other Marlow narrations) and Typhoon. In all thesewritings one observes what a safe bulwark for a troubled conscience,what a simple and yet effective set of rules the code of the merchantnavy can be.The young captain in 'The Secret Sharer' properly qualifies thiswhen, seduced by the void of tropical nightfall, he forgets his dutyand is set upon by chaos. Again we are not confronted with ideals orwith a faith, just with the plain, down-to-earth persuasion that asmall, confined community, such as a ship, is the only possible kind ofsociety men can set up, a community whose soundness will be testedwhen it is desperately fighting for survival in a hostile environment.The land-locked characters of the Malay stories lack even thissmall comfort and solidarity, as well as that of a proper colonialadministration: Western social order proves no more than a trap intoan incomprehensible death when Jim, in Patusan, tries to cling to it inhis dealings with Gentleman Brown. The more Jewel voices her fearthat Jim will go away from her, the more the reader becomes aware ofthe fact that by this Conrad does not simply mean what he has Jimimply, that he will never leave her because he cannot go back to aworld whose rules he has broken and which will therefore reject him.Although Jim does not, of course, try to sail back to Europe, he doestry to return to those self-same Western rules of conduct when hereleases Gentleman Brown, as if theirs were a situation in which


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ARCHIPELAGO, AND THE DECADENT HERO 205honour still counts. But what this amounts to in practice is a betrayalof Jewel and her people, and a death for honour's sake which is not,after all, honourable, since no one stands to gain by it: the abiding bya formal code does not bring Jim any closer to the truth that he hassought, and stops him from doing the only good thing he has beenable to do in his life, help the people in Patusan and give Jewel areason for living: 'He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart,forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic .. . He goes awayfrom a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowyideal of conduct' (p. 416).Gentleman Brown is here deliberately coupled with Jim to showthat 'having been afraid once' does not necessarily mean descendingas low as the former had done.The characters whose stories, whether told or just hinted-at,justify their living in the Malay archipelago, are countless. It will beenough to mention Schomberg and Chester, whose reasons for beingin the East are not told at length but whose behaviour is enough topersuade the reader that nowhere else in the world would they beallowed to offer cheap entertainment or cheap advice. This couldbe said of that host of minor characters, whose plight has grownso desperate that they are even represented as going into mixedmarriage or conducting illegal trade with local tribes. This is neverthe case with the protagonists-Jim or Axel Heyst, for instance-but the host of minor degraded characters, hardly distinguishablefrom the suffocating background scenery, constitutes a significantand ubiquitous reminder of the moral disintegration that constantlythreatens Europeans in the East.In this part of the world every man counts for himself, as I saidearlier. This is quite clearly the case with Captain Brierly, who findshimself on the brink of an abyss at Jim's trial and has a dismal visionof what the latter's fate will be after his certificate has been cancelled;we may assume that it is this imagined prospect that precipitates hiscollapse. He behaves at this point as though enacting for us Jim'sconscience-or for that matter the conscience of any individualwho is 'one of us'-and not simply the conscience of a body of men,the merchant navy, who, in order to preserve their public imageunblemished, are willing to punish and cast away the individual whohas erred. Each member of such a body will also-at this point-feelthat his own private image is safe from disgrace and will rejoice inbelonging to a group that has a code and can at some point draw theline of a safe solidarity. But for Brierly Jim's trial and punishment areno security against chaos; he is forced to recognize the possibilitythat anybody can commit an act of betrayal, even himself. The code


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206 BIGNAMI: JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAYof the 'us' is so remote from principle and ideal, it can rely only on anill-defined and even inhuman 'decency' ('a decent man would nothave behaved like this to a full cargo of old rags in bales' (p. 68)):the borderline between decent and improper behaviour appears toBrierly to be so hazy that he feels he cannot trust himself to discernit in future. Conscious that should a possible choice present itself hewould be alone to face it, he does not feel up to such a threat andjumps from his ship, leaving everything on board it as orderly as adecent man should. A similar lack of faith in any code of justice willlater bring Leggatt to his attempted suicide in 'The Secret Sharer'.No 'fellowship of the craft' exists for Captain Whalley either, and,as with Lingard, the Malay archipelago that witnessed his triumphwill be the scene of his decay and humiliation, and finally of hishonourable death. After his wife's death and his daughter's un-fortunate marriage, he seems to be on his way to a decorous old ageand well-earned retirement but, as the story slowly reveals, theexistence of both sailing-ships and their masters appears to be equallyand hopelessly doomed.8 Still, when Whalley sells the Fair Maid andenters into a partnership with Massey over the Sofala, there are yethopes that he might thrive: Massey himself sees Whalley as a stillpowerful man, rich and healthy, and is in awe of his nauticalcompetence and his aloofness alike. But the reader already knowsfrom the opening pages of the story that this is not true and thatWhalley will be deprived both of his sole support and of his veryidentity when he loses the Fair Maid. Without it, Whalley literallydoes not exist (just as Jasper Allen in 'Freya of the Seven Isles' cannotlive without his brig), and he can command respect only for the briefperiod for which his dimmed eyesight will hold out. Nothing comingfrom outside can save him and, almost unmourned, he goes to thebottom of the sea, the same shallow water on which Jasper Allen'sbrig is left to rot away. Again, we are not confronted with the depthsof the ocean, with its salutary effect on flesh and soul alike asembodied in the exacting home-service: those that work on it areConrad's successful heroes, they belong to the epic strain of TheNigger of the 'Narcissus', of 'Youth', Typhoon, and The ShadowLine. But here, in the shallow waters of the Malay archipelago,

8 It is quite hard to reconstruct a 'tale' in 'The End of the Tether', since Conrad is notinterested in telling it. Instead, he gives us Whalley's plight in an artfully constructed modelwhich can be described as a 'present'-the last voyage of the Sofala-with successive flash-backs containing useful excerpts from Whalley's past as well as the past of the officers of theship. He also gives us a few digressions on the character of Van Wyck. I hope later to be able toshow why I talk about 'digressions' in this case. The complex, non-sequential structure of thenarrative is naturally meant to tell us that Conrad is not interested in telling Whalley's story somuch as in showing us the unfortunate end of sailing ships and men.


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ARCHIPELAGO, AND THE DECADENT HERO 207Conrad's Decadent heroes run aground on the sort of sandbank onwhich The Rescue ends and which easily becomes a metaphor forLingard's actual paralysis when action is required.This brings us to the use of autobiography in Conrad's Easterntales, a most sensitive issue: everything an author writes is, of course,autobiographical in the sense that he always put something of him-self into it; moreover the actual episodes in Conrad's life that go tomake up a good many of his stories have been carefully traced by hisbiographers-and indeed were openly admitted as such by Conradhimself.9 Here I am interested in identifying the connectionsbetween Conrad's world of ideas and set of values, his intellectualautobiography, and such characters as Jim or Axel Heyst. Not onlydoes Conrad credit Jim with his own motives for going to sea-thosethat many a school-boy with an inclination for day-dreaming willprobably always have-but he does so in a language that betrays apeculiarly affectionate tone towards the young man. Looking downfrom the height of his Marlow-wisdom, Conrad cannot but feelsympathy for the youth whose father is all too glad to get rid of him('Jim was one of five sons, and when ... his vocation for the sea haddeclared itself, he was sent at once to a "training ship"', Lord Jim,p. 5) as, we are led to believe, was Tadeusz Bobrowsky to be rid of hisrestless and impoverished nephew. It is, then, the constant, life-longdreaming aspect of Conrad that goes to make up Jim's character.When Conrad, later in life, writes to his aunt Marguerite Poradowskathat he feels he suffers from typical Polish laziness and 'I prefer todream a novel rather than write it' (5 Jan. I907), we cannot helpthinking of Jim and his dreams of great, but unacted deeds of heroismat sea and in distant lands. As with the Judea, it is 'do or die' with Jim,and lack of appropriate action brings him to an untimely death. Histravelling farther and farther eastward in order to escape from thepenetrating and all-reaching eye of the code he betrayed is far worsethan trying to escape the wrath of God-or of any other faith-whoseset rules, once believed in, can in comparison supply the believer withan easily followed conduct book. Nothing of the sort is in store forJim, who is not endowed by his creator with belief in any possibleideal: his lot will be back-waters, jungle, mud, and death at the handof an uncomprehending and incomprehensible native.Far more complex and subtle is the character Conrad creates inAxel Heyst, possibly the only one of his creations-apart from

9 See, for instance, letter to Mrs Sanderson (1917) about The Shadow Line: 'I must tell youthat it is a piece of as strict autobiography as the form allowed' (J. Aubry, Joseph Conrad,Lifeand Letters (London, 1927), ii. 195). But many of the Prefaces to the Uniform Edition volumesmake similar statements.


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208 BIGNAMI: JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAYRazumov, perhaps-to be graced with a philosophical awareness ofman's condition on earth. It is no accident that a Schopenhauereaninheritance is mentioned at this point, old Heyst appearing torepresent in the novel the world of ideas nineteenth-century Europehad produced and bestowed on its heirs. It is not my intention hereto go into the details of this tradition,10 but by recalling it I intend tostress Heyst's isolation in the East: whereas other Eastern charac-ters-such as Jim, Almayer, Whalley, or Lingard-devoid as theyare of faith in an ideal or community, look for solidarity in family andfriends in the hope of escaping the slimy void which surrounds them,Heyst knows all too well that even his hope is vain. He retires to livemainly on tinned food left over from his failed mining venture, allalone on his barren island: it does not yield coal, but neither does itcontain human society for him. The original Alfuro population haseffectively barred the way to its settlements to prevent invasion byEuropean imperialists: the Tropical Belt Coal Company may wellexploit the mineral resources of the island for which the natives haveno use, but from them there will be no help, so Heyst and Morrisonhave to import Chinese labour to work the mine. When the miningenterprise fails, one Chinaman stays behind and the 'white' settlementends up by being inhabited by a Chinaman and a Malay woman-ina suitably lower social position-and a Swede and an English woman.There had previously been an Englishman, Captain Morrison, on theisland, and finally the nondescript trio of adventurers Jones, Ricardo,and Pedro will reach it. Altogether the novel supplies us with a fairshowcase of characters adrift in the world for no good purpose: fromSchomberg, who can easily bring about private revenge on Heystunheeded by any authority, to the fake-Italian Zangiacomo and hismixed company of shady lady-musicians; and the vindictive, butimpotent Portuguese authorities in Delli on Timor island whoimpound Morrison's ship. A very small amount of money can clearhis brig and his reputation alike and set him up as a merchant in thecompany of the disillusioned Swedish philosopher, himself the sonof an embittered aristocratic expatriate to England.Heyst himself had been drifting around the Archipelago longerthan anybody could remember, as the narrator Davidson remarks,apparently because this was the only place where he could live up tohis father's teachings of absolute aloofness, of utter detachment fromhuman bonds and feelings. Even this doctrine, a sort of Schopen-hauerean asceticism, cannot save him from the chaos brought about

10 See, among others, B. Johnson, Conrad's Models of Mind (Minneapolis, 197I). Penetra-ting pages about Victoryare also to be found in J. Batchelor, The Edwardian Novelists (London,1982), chap. 2, passim.


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ARCHIPELAGO, AND THE DECADENT HERO 209in his life by human feelings. Suspicious of all human communitiesand all moral codes, he retires to his round island of Samburan andcuts off any ties with his fellow-creatures. His father's escape fromSweden to England had been a somewhat feeble act of isolation; onlyin a region devoid of all society can Heyst set up his rigorously asceticrules. He manages to survive unscathed his first act of sympathy, therescue of Captain Morrison, but when he makes a fresh 'departurefrom the part of an unconcerned spectator' in bringing Lena back tohis island, for all his still living altogether outside society, he ends upwith a 'wrecked philosophy', is impotent to face Schomberg's primi-tive emotional reaction, and commits suicide after Lena's death at thehands of the diabolical trio. Appropriately, a fire purifies the con-tagion of human feelings with which Samburan has been unhappilypolluted. The doomed protagonist of Conrad's Eastern tales leavesEurope, the 'civilized' world, because he is unable to sustain thepressure of institutionalized human relationships, feels freer towander in a region where no one will ask him to pledge his allegianceto any set ideal or faith, and is thereupon overtaken by a chaos he isnow impotent to withstand; a paradox I hope later to reveal as beingembodied in the character of Van Wick in 'The End of the Tether'.I have enlarged on Victory in order to stress that the Malay archi-pelago not only is the backdrop to but actually becomes a metaphorfor the intellectual attitude of Conrad's heroes. In the earlier worksthat make use of the Malayan setting Conrad is busy telling thestories of particular men, and is concerned to disguise their auto-biographical significances. But when he goes back to the East in hislater stories, never having previously revisited it, he seems to developa sentimental attitude toward the region and the memories it bringsback of youthful action and adventure. This nostalgic attitude, in itsfond outspokenness, appears to tell us far more about the effect of thisexperience on the writer than the earlier, more active one, ever did.Everything, I believe, is a little 'overdone' in the later stories. One hasonly to think of the increasing number of European characters adriftin the shallow waters of the East to appreciate Conrad's restraint onthis point in Lord Jim or 'The End of the Tether'. But at the sametime, as the background comes, so to say, more to the fore, one canbetter understand what the actual historical situation Conrad wasmaking use of was like.Although he is a minor character-and not even one brought toa desperate end-I believe some of the most typical traits of theDecadent image of man come to life in Mr Van Wick, 'the white manof Batu Beru, an ex-naval officer who, for reasons best known tohimself, had thrown up the promise of a brilliant career to become


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BIGNAMI: JOSEPH CONRADthe pioneer of tobacco-planting on that remote part of the coast'(p. 277).

Although the 'reasons best known to himself' will later be shown toconsist merely of an unhappy love-affair, it is really this wish of his tokeep his personal history to himself that characterizes him and turnshim into a somewhat 'flat' character: by 'flat' I do not mean that heis not worked-out-as if he were a figure in a tapestry instead of astatue, as is often the case with minor narrative characters-butrather that he embodies the man-without-a-past that all Conrad'sEastern characters would like to become. He intentionally choosesnot to have a past-or, which amounts to the same thing, to do awaywith the one that he has-and this is why talking about 'digressions'rather than 'flash-backs' seems to me appropriately to define thepages in 'The End of the Tether' that deal with him. Chapter XII,which is wholly dedicated to him, just mentions the measure of VanWick's Eastern past, eight years, but mainly establishes his presentlife and appearance. Not only is his dwelling described, but his wholeway of life-from European newspapers to soda-water-and hisclothing are presented in vivid detail. We are never told in so manywords that he is a desperate soul, but this is made quite clear to usby his paradoxical attitude to the European world which he has soscornfully abandoned. He obtains from the aging Sultan, who livesacross the river in his timeless world, as much ground as he can clearto set up a plantation, builds a house which is perforce of nativedesign, and then fills it with European furniture and objects. It isas if, freed from the constraints of a Europe which used to imposeupon him its own rules and customs, out there in the East-where,as I have said, every man counts for himself-he tries to make up aEurope of his own, 'to shore fragments against his ruins'.

A better and more successful but equally faithless Almayer, notonly does he receive by the tenuous link of the Sofala his mail and hisnewspapers, but over the years he has a piano and an etagere shippedout as well, along with all sorts of things down to the most absurdof all, the gravel for the path that goes from the riverside to hisbungalow: 'It was a fact that the very gravel for his paths had beenimported by the Sofala' (p. 282).It is also a fact that, in hinting at Conrad's intellectual auto-biography, one can see that he himself feels any possible world ofideas tottering beneath his feet. He has no remedy to suggest, no wayto point to, but keeps fondly and single-mindedly going back to aworld of jungle unvanquished by European governments to stand forchaos unlighted by Western reason's ordering power.

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Documents

Joseph Conrad, The Malay Archipelago, And the Decadent Hero