Atef Laouyeoe

Ine Deterioration of the Colonial Protagonîkt in th tee Nmek by Josqh Conrad

La DPtProration du Héros CuZoniaZ dans euils Récits de Joseph Conrad

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For my Parents, Syrine, Oussama, Jihan and al1 my Brothers

III

Résumé

Dans ce mémoire nous proposons d'étudier trois récits écrits par Joseph Conrad, a

savoir, Heurt of Darkness, Lord JUn et Victory. Notre objectif consiste à démontrer, dans

ces trois romans, la défaillance de l'entreprise impériale et la déficience de ses valeurs

coloniales. La détérioration du héros colonial dans chacune de ces œuvres sera considérée

comme preuve de la position anti-impérialiste de Conrad. La critique de la mission

coloniale et la représentation anti-raciste de l'indigène que nous présente Conrad dans ces

romans nous révèlent l'un des premiers écrivains post-coloniaux dans la langue anglaise.

L'impérialisme que Conrad a vécu en tant que Polonais ainsi que les techniques de

narration qu'il déploie pour condamner le projet impérial et pour détruire ses stéréotypes

idéologiques rendent valide notre approche post-coloniale des trois œuvres proposées.

Dans h a r t of Darkness, Lord Jim et Victory, Conrad développe ses idées anti-colonialistes

et son sens de la dignité humaine d'une façon qui intéresse encore la plupart des écrivains

et critiques post-coloniaux contemporains comme V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje et Hanif

Kureishi.

In this thesis we will consider three riovels by Joseph Conrad, Heart ufDarkness,

LordJim and Victory, our purpose being to reveal how these three novels bnng to light his

view of the failure of the imperial enterprise and the deficiency of its colonial values. The

deterioration of the colonial protagonist in each of these three novels is taken to be

evidence of Conrad's anti-imperialist stance. His criticism of the colonial mission and his

unbiased representation of the colonized indigene in tbem rank hirri arnong the first post-

colonial writers at work in the English language. Conrad's persona1 experience of

imperialism allows u s to make a defendable post-colonial reading of the novels in question.

His expenence, it is shown, led him to develop his peculiar use of language and narrative

structure to condemn the European imperial project and to deconstruct its ideological

stereotypes. in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Vicmry, Conrad develops his anti-

colonialist views and his sense of human dignity in a way that continues to draw the

attention of many contemporary post-colonial writers and critics such as V. S. Naipaul,

Michael Ondaatje, and Hanif Kureishi.

Table of Contents

Résumé..,.. ..................................-.............................. .....................m Abstract.. .................................................................. .......................IV

Table of Contents ............................................................ ..................-..V

............................................................................. Acknowledgements VI

Introduction .................................................................. ..................XII

........................... Cha p ter 1: Conrad's Persona1 Expen-ence oflmperialism.. -1

..................... Chapter II: Language as the Reflection of Imperia1 Elusiveness. I l

............................ Chapter III: The StereotypicalPerception of the Indigene ..28

Chapter IV: The Failure of the ImpeMI Enterprise ..................................... 5 2

................................................ Chapter V: The Subversion of the Image.. -72

Conclusion ............................................................ ............................93 . . Bibliography. ................... .........-...............,.......................................99

1 would Iike to express specific gratitude to professor Dr. Antoine Raspa, who

supervised my work and guided me with great patience and open-mindedness. My supreme

debt is to his illuminating spirit and scholarly wisdom, without which this work could not

have been possible. Working under his supervision has been an extremeiy informative

academic experience.

1 should also express my heartfelt gratefdness to al1 the members of rny family who

have been a constant source of encouragement and help as well as models of inteilectual

and professional dedication.

My warmest thanks are also due to my girlfriend, Gwendaline, whose love,

forbearance and comments have given me courage and self-confidence.

Sincere thanks to al1 my colleagues at Lavai University, whose kindness and

friendliness have made my stay in Quebec most agreeable.

Finally, I must offer my thanks to al1 my English-literature teachers and teaching

assistants at Laval for their assistance and guidance.

INTRODUCTION

In the 1 s t two decades of the twentieth century, Conrad's fiction has corne to

achieve a new and substantial position in literary discussions. The emergence of

postcolonial literary theories during this penod has developed the debate over Conrad's

artistic creations and his own moral visions. Because he wrote the majority of his fiction

during the heyday of imperid expansionism and from the centre of the English Empire

itself, the study of Conrad and his works fiom a postcolonial perspective now provokes

opposing arguments concerning his stance vis-à-vis the irnperial project. A whole body of

recent postcolonial crititism, in fact, has been devoted to the study of Conrad's anti-

imperialist views as articulated in his major novels. In the scope of this thesis we shall

humbly contribute éo this wide-ranging Conrad criticism by attempting to emphasize the

writer's real attitudes towards irnperial ideologies and colonial practices. Limiting our

analysis to three novels, namely, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory, our purpose

Ltims at showing how these works provide us with sufficient evidence for Conrad's

disapproval of coloniaiist thought-

We chose these three novels because we noticed in them the early manifestations of

what we now designate as a postcolonial perspective. In such novels as H a r t of Darhess,

Lord Jim and Victory, the diligent reader can detect the first appearances of an already

developed postcolonial thought at the very beginning of the twentieth century. The first

and foremost evidence of the development of this thought in these novels is adumbrated in

Conrad's attempt to expose the failings and limitations of imperiaiism as both a frarne of

mind a mode of conduct. Conrad's attack upon irnperial ideology is illustrated in these

novels by his constant emphasis on the corrupted and compting bebaviour of the European

colonizer. A basic precept in postcolonial thinking is the erosive cn'ticism of what is called

Euro-centric Universalism. By exposing and condemning the degraded behaviour of the

European in the colonies, Conrad subtly challenges and ovemdes the Euro-centricity and

universalism of colonial presumptions. Another significant precept in pos tcolonial thinking

is to restore the impaired image of the colonized Other. Here again, in Heart of Darkness,

Lord Jim and Victory, we shall provide evidence of how Conrad's unbiased representation

of the indigenous races disrnantles the old colonialist habit of constnicting stereotypes of

others who are indigenes. Our iast contention is that although postcolonid theory has

emerged in literary discussions only in the last two decades of the previous century, the

study of the three novels proposed in this thesis reveals the presence of a postcolonial

writer, Conrad, at its very beginning.

In Our thesis we shall study Heart of Darkness, Lord Jirn and Victory so as to bring

to light their anti-impenaiist thrust. Both the narrative strategy and the thematic structure

of these novels seem to break the mould of the stereotypical colonial discourse and its

ideological undertones. The deterioration of the colonial protagonist in Conrad's three

novels, which is the title we give to O u r thesis, is to be understood as a patent and

irrefutable proof of Our writer's censure of colonial ideoIogy. Kurtz, Jim and Heyst, the

protagonists of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory, respectively, are supposed to be

the torchbearers of Western civilization and imperial Europe in the apparently dark regions

of the colonies. These protagonisrs, however, emerge to us as anti-heroic figures as they

fail to carry out their missions as representatives and loyal officiais of their respective

empires. Kurtz casts away any allegiance to his colonial principles and duties and creates

his own realm in the Congo jungle. Jirn, for bis part, is so blind to the hidden forces of

imperialism that he ultimately falls victim to ils hideous manoeuvres in the Far-Eastern

regions. And, finally, Heyst is conceived of as the anti-thesis of his own imperial drearns

of success since he, too, falls victim to imperial intervention in the Far-East colonies. If

such individuals as Kurtz, Jim, and Heysr who are supposed to be the emissaries of Empire,

and yet who betray or fail to carry out its principles, then these very principles need re-

assessrnent and re-evaluation. In a word, their failure is to be viewed as nothing but the

failure of the imperial enterprise altogether.

In our analysis of Heurt of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory, we shall focus on how

effective language is in transrnitting and sometimes explaining the nature of certain

problematic social and moral issues. In Conrad's art, the significance of words is so elusive

and so changing that sometimes it is impossible for us to develop a definite understanding

of what he has written. Our task in this thesis, however, is to demonstrate how the

linguistic relativism that we find in Conrad's art of fiction, and particularly in the three

novels we chose for study, cornes to underscore the relativism of imperial ideologies. Since

language is an uncertain instrument and yet the sole means by which human expenence is

discussed rationally, then it follows that any search for epistemological crrtainty is tainted

or characterized by scepticism and doubt. It is, in fact, on such grounds of what language

reveals that we shall base Our assumptions about Conrad's critique of imperialism as a

doubtf1.11 and equivocal system of belief.

What characterizes the colonialist discourse is its constant reliance on such

stereotypical binary oppositions as colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage and

good versus evil. For a better understanding of the dynamics as well as the origins of

theses binarisms, we shall rely on Orientalkm, in which Edward Said engages in a

historiographical scrutiny of the West-East opposition. Relying also on what Homi Bhabha

advances in his The Location of Culture, we shall consider the colonial discourse and its

ideological and rhetorical stereotypes and conclude that they are fûodamentally

psychological phenornena. In the three novels we chose to study, as a matter of fact, we

shali try to show how Conrad exposes such stereotypical colonial perception and

construction of otherness and how he condernns it as being the cause for the detenoration

and disintegration of both colonizer and colonized. The deterioration of the colonial

protagonist as well as the faiIure of the irnperÏal enterprise in these three novels are

revealed to be the outcome of a limited and flawed perception of the colonized "Other".

Our ultimate contention in this thesis is that in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory,

Conrad rejects such mode of perceiving othemess and advocates cultural exchange between

al1 human races as the essential prerequisite for their peaceful coexistence and survival.

Conrad' s Persona1 Experience of Imperialism

The study of Conrad's fictional narratives has always sparked a great nurnber of

controversies. One of these controversies concems the development of his political

views in his artistic creations. Art and politics, in Conrad's fictional world, have

becorne inseparably fused. The ingeniousness with which Conrad weaves his anti-

irnperialist ideas witbin the thematic structure of his novels makes the task of uncovenng

his real political attitudes demanding and sometimes quite speculative. It is our hope,

however, in the space of this thesis to study thee of Conrad's novels, namely, Lord Jim,

Wear? of Darkness and Victory, and to reveal how the subtexts of these narratives come

to establish their creator as the early twentieth-century anti-imperialist writer par

excellence in the English language. Post-colonial theory, which appeared only two

decades ago, will provide the fiamework for the treatment of these novels. What we will

actually consider in this thesis is how the noveIs we have proposed deconstruct, both

thematically and linguistically, the old stereotypes of the colonial discourse. In each of

these narratives, the failings of the imperial enterprise are conspicuously emphasized. In

the realm of his fiction, Conrad dethrones the colonialist ideology and establishes the

higher tniths of the hurnan condition. By transcending the Euro-centrism of such an

ideology, Conrad attempts to assert that no Manichean principle can ever determine the

nature of human relationships. In other words, the colonizer-versus-colonized, or West-

versus-East mode of perception that largely characterizes the colonial discourse is to be

shown to be completely dismantied in the three novels we propose to study.

However, before we start tracing Conrad's anti-irnperialist and anti-colonialist

views in theses noveIs, we deemed it most profitable to provide our reader with certain

historical-biographical tniths. in the context of our study, an acquaintance with

Conrad's persona1 experience of imperidism certainly leads to a full appreciation of his

fiction. in fact, Our purpose in this first chapter is to highlight the importance of this

experience as a first foundation upon which we will build Our assumptions about

Conrad's anti-imperialist attitudes. Because he has often been attacked as a "typical

Western irnperïalist" (Harpham, Il), our attempt in this chapter, as well as in the whole

thesis, aims at showing the shortsightedness of this stance. Conrad's background,

having consisted in an oppressed Polish nation, and what he himself has to Say about the

colonization of his native land, wiil be a further evidence of his anti-colonialist views.

Joseph Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was the son of Appollo Korzeniowski, a

member of the Polish upper class and a "passionate, courageous patriot, totally

comrnitted to the liberation of Poland from Russia" (Batchlor, 3). Conrad's father was

directly invoived in the risings and rebellious movements against Russians, who, along

with Austnans and Prussians, started to partition the land in 1772 and continued to do so

until 1918 when Poland was established as an independent state. This political activism,

in fact, caused trouble not only for Conrad's father but also for the other members of the

family, In October 1861, the four-year old Conrad's parents, Appollo and Ewa

Bobrowski, were arrested by Russians and were exiled to Volgoda, northeast of

Moscow. Four years later, Conrad's rnother died in exile to leave him "alone with his

increasingly melancholic and mystical father" (Harpharn, 1). The latter's involvement in

the 1863 Polish insurrection against Russian authorities caused deaths on both sides of

Conrad's patemal and matemal families. Among the Korzeniowskis, his two uncles,

Robert and Hilary, were involved in this nsing. The former was killed in 1863, while the

latter died in exile two years later. Among the Bobrowskis, Conrad's matemal family,

Ewa's brother, Stephan, was killed in a duel in 1863 defending Polish honour against the

Russians.

Conrad's father was not only a committed Polish patrïot but also a distinguished

man of letters. Apart from his rernarkabIe education in Iaw and Ianguages, Appollo

Korzeniowski was "a poet, playwright, critic, political essayist and translater" (Batchlor,

5). Almost al1 his intellectual works underscore his steadfast patriotism and his ardent

desire to liberate his country from Russian oppression. Two weeks after his arrival in

exile at the pend coIony of Volgoda with his wife and son, Appollo wrote to his cousins

Gabriala and Jan Zagorski: "We do not regard exile as a punishmeni but as a new way of

serving our country. There can be no punishment for us, since we are innocent-

Whatever the form of service may be, it always means living for others.-.so do not pity

us and do not think of us as martyrs" (Batchlor, 7). Korzeniowski's devotion to bis

country and to the restoration of a distinct Polish identity is further illustrated by the way

in which he wants his son Konradek to be brought up. In another letter he sent to his

fiiend Stephan Buszczynski from exile, he says, "my first object is to bnng up Konradek

not as a democrat, aristocrat, demagogue, republican, monarchist, or as a servant and

flunkey of those parties - but only as a Pole" (Batchior, 7).

As a poet, Korzeniowski wrote poetry that expresses the distress and agony of a

dispossessed people. In his Purgatorial Cantos (1849-54), for instance, Korzeniowski

rnoums the Ioss of his ancestral land to the impenal powers. After the Partition of 1759,

Poland became "an administrative area split up between three different States, Russia,

Pmssia, and Austria" (Batchlor, 7). As such, the history of medieval and Renaissance

glory of the PoIish empire became submerged in the national consciousness to be

replaced by the reality of shameful defeat and dependence. Acutely sensitive to the

ignominy to which his country had been reduced, Korzeniowski composed what one

rnay describe as national poetry "full of despair and patriotic grief'. For example,

So many days and so many years have we groaned with the voice of orphans on this our mother's grave, accompanied by the music of thunder; on our own soi1 - yet disposed, in our own homes - yet homeless! this once proud domain of our fathers is now but a cernetery and min.

Our fame and greatness have melted away in a Stream of blood and tears; and Our sole matrhony is the dust and bones of our ancestors. (Batchlor, 5)

Although he never wrote a novel, Conrad's father still wished to write one that would be

no less patriotic than the poetry he had been composing. While in exile, and in one of

the epistles to his friend Buszczynski, he communicated his intention of writing a

lengthy novel portraying the balehl effects of Russian domination on Poland and its

people: "a long Polish novel is in my head - about the depravity flowing to u s from

Moscow through the Asiatic splendour, the bureaucratic honours, the disbelief

inculcated into public education, the baubles of civilized fashionable Moscovy, and

finally by penetration through inter-mamage. It would begin in '54 and end in 1861"

(Batchlor, 5). In this very context, Batchlor suggests that had the father's novel corne

into existence, it would have borne some resemblance later to the wrîtings of his son.

As a matter of fact, BatchIor finds it remarkable that Conrad's "major political novel",

Under Western Eyes, shares the sarne "feelings about Russia's relationship with Poland"

as those of his father's potential novei (5).

It was as a translater, however, and not as a creative wnter of pure fiction or

poetry that Conrad's father was best recognized. A great admirer of Shakespeare,

Korzeniowski wrote a panegyric essay in which he extolled the EngIish poet's ingenuity

and universality. His translations of Shakespeare include such plays as The Comedy of

Ermrs, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Much A h Abuuz Nothing. He also translated

Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Among the French writers, he translated many of Victor

Hugo's works, including La Légende des Siècles, Les Misérables, Les Travailleurs de la

Mer and Morion Delorme, and the French rornantic poet Alfred De Vigny's tragedy

Chatterton. Korzeniowski was also said to have translated sorne of the poems of the

Gennan Romantic Heinrich Heine. Busza suggests that if Korzeniowski chose to

translate Dickens, Hugo and Heine, it was because they "were radicals who shared, in

some measure, his own social and political creed" (Busza, 6) . No matter how tenable

Busza's remark is - for, after ail, neither Dickens, Hugo nor Heine was as radical as

Korzeniowski himself - the sigificance of these translations was that they, on the one

hand, introduced the young Conrad to an international literature and, on the other,

acquainted him with his father's artistic talents as well as his political views.

Probably, there is no better illustration of Korzeniowski' s political cornmitment

to the cause of d l oppressed nations than when he displays his antagonism towards

Russian autocracy. Waile in exile, Conrad's father wrote a long essay, Poland and

Muscovy", which Najder qualifies as "a combination of personal memoirs of

imprisonment, interrogation and exile with historiosophical musings about Russia and

her relations with the rest of Europe" (CP, 32). The following quotation is taken fkom

Najder's translation of Korzeniowski 's essay and illustrates the author's vehement

op~osition to Russian intervention into the affairs of other European nations:

The aim of Muscovy's development is to bnng to a standstill dl progress of humankind. So there is nothing surprising that Muscovy should keep this aim secret, and if it were not for her history 1 could be accused of exaggeration. Muscovy's history, however, shows that ever since she wrigded her way into European affairs, she has launched passionate attacks against every holy principle which happened to bloom in the civilized world, devouring or maiming it dangerously. (Batchlor, 7)

Although this essay by his father was written when Conrad was o d y seven-years old, it

is quite remarkable that echoes of it are unmistakably apparent in his son's later political

essays. As Batchlor observes, the younger "Conrad's treatrnent of Russia as a rnindless

and camivorous force'' is sirnilar to that of his father (7). In fact, Conrad's depiction of

Russia as an inscmtable monster becomes almost a leitrnotif, especiaily in his two

essays, "Autocracy and War" (1905) and "The Crime of Partition"(l919). In the former,

Conrad emphasizes the mysteriousness, or the c'impenetrability", of Russia insofar as it

fosters both despotism and holiness.

This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly d a m of her existence as a state she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and end of her organization. Hence arises her impenetrability to whatever is true in Western thought. Western thought, when it crosses her frontier, fdls under the spell of her

autocracy and becornes a noxious parody of itself. Hence the contradiction, the riddle of her national life, which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of the world. The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism. Tt seems to have gone inio the blood, tainting every mental activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinahg assertion of purity and holiness- The Government of Holy Russia, arrogating to itself the supreme power to tonnent and slaughter the bodies of its subjects iike a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation. The worst crime against humanity by that system we behold now crouching at bay behind vast heaps of rnaogled corpses is the mthless destruction of innumerable minds. The greatest horror of the world - madness - walked faithfully in its train. (NLL, 98-9)

Even though one rnight be accused of over-interpretation, one could venture to draw a

parallel between Russia in this essay and Kurtz in Hearr of Darkness. Both the real

notion in the younger Conrad's essay and his iater fictional character of Kurtz evoke

images of tyranny, horror, and madness governed by imperialism.

But before the younger Conrad wrote his political essays, his father, Appollo,

was almost a national figure that devoted his life to the liberation of his country. His

radical patnotism expressed itself in a political activism that made him among others a

danger to Russian mle in Poland. Russian authority, therefore, could not but pour its

wrath on Korzeniowski and his family. The young Conrad obviously could not

understand much of what was happening in this political situation, for when his father

died he was only eleven-years old. Nonetheless, the little that Conrad could remember

of his parents' experience confirms the fact that he, though unconsciously, had also

inherited antagonistic attitudes towards the imperial powers against which his parents

fought. In his A Personal Record (1912), Conrad sadly reminisces on what he had

witnessed with his parents in exile. One of the scenes indelibly engraved in his memory

was when his mother was forced to move back with her son to her penal settlement in

Volgoda, after she had obtained, in consideration of her il1 health, "the unusual grace" of

a three-months' stay in Nowofaslow (Aubry, 9). Although he was only six, Conrad

could remember perfectly how his mother was refused a prolongation of her stay on her

brother's estate and how Russian officiais obliged her to leave despite the fact that her

"only chance of recovery would have been to stay longer" (Aubry, 9). Aubry writes:

"though [Conrad] could not understand the full significance of what was happening, the

tragic sadness of that day when he and his mother were forced to tear themselves away

from their relations and take again the road to Russia remained graven in his memory"

(10)-

That Appollo Korzeniowski was often criticized for being a reckless

revolu tionary and idealist, especiall y b y his brother-in-law, Tadeusz Bobrowski, does

not mean that Conrad came to see his father in the same Iight. Defending his father

"against the classification as a 'revoiutionist'", Conrad States in "The Author's Note" to

A Personal Record that "no epithet could be more inapplicable to a man with such a

strong sense of responsibility in the region of ideas and action and so indifferent to the

promptings of personal ambitions as my fatier" (CP, 42). In fact, Conrad, like many

other Polish patriots, sees his father as a heroic national figure who sacrîficed his life in

order to obtain fieedom for his country and his people. Even though Korzeniowski's

death did not bring back the lost glory of the Polish people, it proved at least the depth of

the cornmitment and of the eagemess to express his yeamings and his aspirations. In his

essay, "Poland Revisited" (1915), Conrad recalls the day of his father's funeral when he,

"an eleven-year old orphan, strode alone at the head of the procession, conscious of a

rnighty following behind him" (CP, 1).

Ln the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and tragic memones, I could see again the small boy of that day following a hearse; a space kept clear in which 1 walked alone, conscious of an enormous following ... Half the population had tumed out on that fme May aftemoon. They had not come to honor a great achievement, or even some splendid failure. The dead and they were victims alike of an unrelenting destiny which cut them off from every path of merit or glory. They had come only to render homage to the ardent fidelity of the man whose life had been a feariess confession in word and deed of a creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel and understand.

The creed for which Conrad's father died can actually be translated into a belief in the

necessity of the struggle against al1 forms of imperialism and colonization.

Again, in "The Author's Note" to A Personal Record, Conrad revives the

memory of his father's funeral and the sense of national belonging and cornmon destiny

that i t stimulated in the crowd. What Conrad cornes to recognize in this process of

retrospective wnting is the significance of his father's death as an occasion for Polish

people to express their sense of community and national identity:

but 1 understood perfectly well that this was a manifestation of the national spirit seizing a worthy occasion. That bareheaded mass of work people, youths of the university, women at the windows, school-boys on the pavement, could have known nothing positive about him except the fame of his fidelity to the one guiding emotion in their hearts. 1 had nothing but that knowledge myself, and this great silent demonstration seemed to me the most natural tn%ute in the world - not to the man but to the Idea. Warpham 9 2)

In a recent snidy of Conrad and his works, Harpharn devotes quite a lengthy chapter to

the sigaificance of this passage în Conrad's essay and to the exploration of his idea of

ccPolishness". In his One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad (1996), Harpham tries to

uncover the real implications of what Conrad refers to as "the national spirit", "the

guiding emotion7', or more generdly, "the Idea? In Harpham's view, these terms refer

to the problem of Polish national identity, an identity erased by extemal impenal powers

(3). After the 1795 Partition of Poland, Harpham explains, "Poland did not exist as a

sovereign state", but rather as a theoretical entity (3). When Conrad writes about "the

guiding emotion", he is actually alluding to what Johann Gottlieb Fichte would cal1 "the

guiding spirit" of the Germanic race. In a sense, Conrad's idea of the nation, somehow

like Fichte's, is determined, not by blood, fanguage, or even religion, but rather by that

"guiding spirit" which binds the inhabitants of the land together. Our assumption is that

although he does not become chauvinistic in tone as does Fichte, Conrad still beiieves

that this "guiding spirit" of the land and its inhabitants, or this "Idea", is after dl worth

dying for.

On many occasions, Conrad makes his readers understand that it is due to the

adverse effects of colonization that Poland is deprived of a distinct national identity. In

his Notes on Life and Letters, he suggests that the last partition of Poland generated an

unavoidable cnsis of belonging in the country. Being trapped between two antagonistic

polarities, Poland could not identify itself either with Germans or with Russians. In his

essay, "A Note on the Polish Problem7'(1916), Conrad writes: "That element of racial

unity which may be called Polonism, remained compressed between Pmssian

Germanisrn on one side and Russian Slavonism on the other- For Germanism it feels

nothing but hatred. But between Polonism and Slavonism there is not so much hatred as

a complete and ineradicable incompatibility" (NU, 135-6). What Conrad atternpts to

underline here is that Poland's predicament stems from its geopolitical location.

Because of the absence of any affinity either with Russians to the East or Gemans to the

West, Poland finds itself caught within an "inconceivable space", a "spatial

betweenness" that denies her any sense of belonging (Harpham, 4). Earlier in the same

essay, Conrad refers to the yearnings of the Poles for a national identity and their

desperate search for a sense of fieedom: "But for Poles to be Germanophile is

unthinkable. To be Russophile or Austrophile is at best a counsel of despair in view of a

European situation which, because of the grouping of the Powers, seems to shut fiom

them every hope, expressed or unexpressed, of a national future nursed through more

than a hundred years of suffering and oppression" (NU, 134-5).

Conrad's persona1 experience of colonization, 3s he describes it in the above

passages, has often been overlooked in the study of his works. At best, Harpharn claims,

it is referred to only to account for the c'source of characters, incidents or attitudes" (10).

If there is any difficulty a cntic of the younger Conrad may face, it is to decide whether

his discourse supports the imperial effort or works against it. According to Harpham,

the confusion arises mainly from Conrad's persona1 life experience: "Conrad's

experience of domination was not merely tourïstic: he had actually been dominated, but

he had also lived as a citizen and agent of the imperial nations. His experience, in other

words, was truly comprehensive, a fact that confuses the mordizing mind and is, indeed,

genuinely confusing" (10). It is this same confusion that the reader may encounter when

he tries to trace Conrad's idea of Polonism throughout his works. It is interesting to note

that Conrad's fictional discourse scarceIy addresses the question of Polish nationalism in

a straightfonvard manner. As Harpham explains, Conrad, unlike his contemporary

James Joyce, "wrote about Poland only in a manner so indirect and encrypted as to elude

even his detection" (9-10). As such, the ehsiveness of Conrad's discourse comes to

highlight the elusiveness of the Polish identity itself. To put it in other terms, in

Conrad's fictional world, Poland becomes conspicuous by its absence rather than by its

presence. As Harpham neatly expresses it, Conrad "wrote about an erased Poland in a

manner that reflected and repeated that erasure" (10). In this sense, Conrad's Poland is

further reduced from an impossible geopolitical space to a mere imaginative entity, or

what Conrad himself cails an "Idea". "The literal nonappearance" of Poland within

Conrad's fictional works stresses the fact that it exists, not as a concrete physical space,

but rather as a hypothetical construct (Harpham, 12)- As Harpham writes, "the absence

of PoIand, and of politics in general, in Conrad's works, is ... more eloquently and

passionately expressive of the reality of Poland than any concrete rendering of Poland

could possibly be" (62).

Within these conceptuai and historical-biographical parameters, the critic may

find a leeway to trace Conrad's anti-imperialist ideas in at least three of his major works.

From what Conrad learned from his father's experience and from what he hirnself

expenenced as both object and agent of imperialism, one may be allowed the possibility

of interpreting, if not all, at least some of his novels as anti-colonialist. Our study of

Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory, will aim at showing how Conrad "represents

the irnperial encounier as one in which everyone on al1 sides is variously decomposed"

(Harpham, 49). In fact, the study of the novels proposed will demonstrate that neither

the colonizer nor the colonized can be spared the wounds of a violent colonial encounter.

Yet Conrad's real attitudes towards imperialism are not easy to detect. They are as

evasive as his whole fictional discourse. For this reason, Our next chapter will focus on

Conrad's language and how it reflects his anti-imperialist views.

Chapter II

Language as the RejIection of Imperid Elusiveness

The second half of the nineteenth century in Europe was marked by a

considerable change in its system of sociai values and beliefs. In England, for example,

the moral earnestness of the Victorian era was being replaced by a growing distrust in

the righteousness of human conduct. The once unquestionable orthodox beliefs and

codes of behaviour were now being re-exarnined by a more experimental generation,

influenced by Darwinisrn and scientific rationdism. With the rise of the middle class

and the spread of socialist views, particularly in the last decade of Queen Victoria's long

reign, the aura of English imperialism entered a moribund phase, characterized by doubt

in its values and ideals. In the early twentieth century, with Queen Victoria's death in

1901 and the birth of the independent Labour Party, the Empire rapidly began to Iose

much of its expansionist glory, and its own ideals were cast into doubt and somehow

rejected as sham human pride and vainglory. This general antagonistic attitude towards

the Empire, inherent in the Labour movement inside Britain as weil as in the events in

the colonies themseives, was accentuated by the brutdity of its persistent involvement in

world affairs and its continuing colonialist ambitions. The Boer War (18994902) in

South Africa, for instance, engendered strong reactions against English imperialist

policies. Fighting against the Boers, the original Dutch settlers, and the Native Zuh and

Kaffir tribes, the colonizing British employed al1 possible means to take over the riches

of the land. The use of intemment camps, which caused the death of thousands of Boer

women and children, irredeemably impaired the world image and prestige of the British

Empire. It was during this period, when the English subject started questioning the

justice and validity of the ide& behind the imperid effort, that our writer, Conrad,

produced his most chdlenging fiction. His expenence as a Master in the British

merchant Marine for more than twenty years allowed him to have a direct knowledge

and a deep perception of the Empire's colonialist intentions and practices. Being an

agent of this Empire and a first-hand witness of the injuries that it idicted on both

colonizer and colonized, Conrad came to appreciate fully the dubiousness of imperial

values. To project the elusive nature of such values and to capture it within a fictional

framework become Conrad's rnost ardent task.

In addition to the disillusionment with imperialistic ideals, in intellectual matters,

the late nineteenth century aiso witnessed the emergence and the growing influence of

Nietzschean philosophy. According to this philosophy, the metaphysical world is no

longer a shelter for man from the ongoing and devastating movement of rational thought

and scientific progress. Nietzsche's concept of the "Death of God" cornes as an

inauguration of a whole culturai process of secularization that will maintain its growth

throughout the twentieth century. Nietzsche's philosophic vision presupposes that the

world is void of any order or Iogic- The laws of nature are not subject to any moral

justification. A divinely govemed universe is no longer a tenable belief. In his The Gay

Science (1882), Nietzsche stresses the futility of any attempt that tries to understand or

qualiQ the nature of the world in which we live:

The total character of the world.,.is in al1 etemity chaos, in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom and whatever other names there are for aesthetic anthropomorphism . . .Let us beware of attributing to it [Le. the universel heartlessness and unreason or their opposites.. .. None of Our aesthetic or moral judgments apply to it .... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who transgresses (Erdinast-Vulcan 16).

In her seminal work, Joseph Conrad and The Modern Temper (1991), Daphna

Erdinast-Vulcan expounds on Nietzsche's world views and remarks that "the withdrawal

of God from the universe" is a necessary price to pay for scientific evolution: "The price

paid for the ernancipation fYom metaphysics was the aboiition of the concept of a

divinely ordered universe, of the anthropomorphic view of man's place in that universe,

and of what was hitherto conceived in ternis of 'spirit' and 'soui"' (10). Nietzsche's

destruction of a metaphysicdy conceived universe, Erdinast-Vulcan contends, has

eagendered a sense of scepticism and "acute epistemological uncertainty" (12). What

used to be considered as "absolute tniths and values" has been replaced by a new

"relativistic and sceptical outlook" (12). She goes on arguing that this new concern

about epistemological relativism has also had its impact on "the realm of ethics". The

modern man's unwillingness to explain the universe in any religious terms has created in

him what we may cal1 a crisis of morality. She claims that "the demolition of the

metaphysical-religious foundations of ethics by scepticism, empiricism, and relativism

had left a vacuum of moral authority". Morality has turned out to be nothing but

"another man-made system, as ephemeral and fragile as any other human constr~ct '~

(13)-

It was against this background of scepticism, relativism, and moral uncertainty

that Conrad lived and wrote. Nietzsche's philosophy and the emerging relativistic

theories of that age can be easiiy traced in his world perceptions and artistic visions. In

the Twilight of Idols (18891, Nietzsche states that "there are no moral facts

whatsoever. .*Mordity is only an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a

misinterpretation . . . . Morality is rnerely sign language, merely symptomatology"

(Erdinast-Vulcan 16). Like Nietzsche, seemingly, disillusioned in any ethical authority

that might govem the world, Conrad writes to his friend Cunningharne Graham: "There

is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves

which drives us about in a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is

always but a vain and fleeting reality" (Erdinast-Vulcan 18). The absence of a moral

centre in the universe and the relativity of any epistemological undertaking become two

central issues in Conrad's fiction. More significant is the relatedness of such issues to

Conrad's anti-imperialist views. What we wish to argue here is that the amorality of

impenalism comes to function as a paradigm for and a manifestation of the ethical

impoverishment of a growingly materialized age and that the impenal ideology is as

elusive as any other human construct.

However, revealing the ehsiveness of the irnperial values that are expressed by

language is not an easy task, particularly when this language is not Iess elusive than

what it attempts to describe. In a letter to Cunninghame, Conrad adrnits desperately the

subjectivity and inadequacy of language as a means of expression and communication:

"Life knows us not and we do not know Iife - we don't know Our thoughts, Half the

words we use have no meaning whatever. And of the other half each man understands

each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs

shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced die..."( Erdinast-

Vulcan 18).

Conrad's awareness of this world of chimera that he tries to represent in bis

fiction is reveaied in both form and style. Tne narrative ellipses, the multiplicity of

perspectives, and the unreliability of the narrator - al1 these are story-telling techniques

that characterize the Conradian world of fiction as well as describe the background of

scepticism in which he wrote. In the three novels we wish io study, these techniques

serve to assert the fact that absolute tmth is a mere mirage and man's perpetual search

for it is inevitably an unfruithl endeavour. The colonial pretension that Western

civilization is the representative of pure values and the shining example of ideal social

uprightness is ostensibly debunked in Conrad's novels. The deterioration of the

protagonist of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory, respectively, is an indication of

the faiIure and the holIowness of such pretensions- In each of these novels, the hero, be

he Kurtz, Lord Jim or Heyst, falls victim to his self-willed and obdurate craving for

absolute truth and perfection. As he tries to live up to the ideals of the civilization he

represents, the hero of each novel discovers the shakiness of such ideals. The

disenchantment in these ideals, in fact, leads to his ultimate disintegration. In the scope

of this chapter of this thesis, we will attempt to show that the elusiveness of Conrad's

language and narrative strategy is in actual fact a powemil reflection of the elusiveness

of colonialist ideology and its moral foundations.

The impossibility of containing reality within a definite verbal constnict can

perhaps be explained by the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified

in hguage. That is, in this case, where the signifier is irnperialist ideology and where

the signified is cornplex human experience, does the latter succeed in giving us a clear

image of the former once it is put into words. The deficiency of language in conveying

and descnbing the human condition in Conrad's novels has the effect of suggesting that

there existed a contemporary conviction in his day that the human condition is itself

deficient. Life is not only problematic but dso flawed. Yet, despite their possible

ineffectiveness, the words a man uses in his Ianguage remain the basic vehicle through

which he communicates the prievances and anxieties of his flawed life. It is the word

that he resorts to that defines the nature of human relationships and determines the codes

of moral and social behaviour. Such a word or ianguage allows each of us to give reality

a kind of palpable and tangible existence. To use Carlyle's terms, it is the first garment

of our reality. Without it, reality remains inscrutable and impenetrable. What we corne

to sense, therefore, in Conrad's novels is two things. The first is his awareness of both

the arbitrariness and ineffectiveness of the word and at the sarne time of the necessity of

using it. The second, which is much more noteworthy, is Conrad's use of linguistic

relativism as a reflection of the relativism of colonial ideologies,

In her rernarkable work, Solitude versus Solidarity in the Noveïs of Joseph

Conrad (1998), Ursula Lord clearly demonstrates the close affinity between Conrad's

peculiar use of language and his anti-colonialist views. She suggests that in Heart of

Darhess, for instance, "the function of language and the theme of colonialism coalesce,

for language serves simultaneously as vehicle, metaphor, and paradigm of the pretences

and deceptions of colonial expansions" (67). If the colonial enterprise is based on mere

deceptive r'netoric, then it should not be surprising that Marlow's journey leads to

nothing palpable or comprehensible. The two words, "The hormr! The horror!" uttered

by the half-human half-demented Kurtz at the end of the novel are what Marlow brings

back with him after a nightrnarish trip in the African wildemess. Not that these words

are insignificant, as they convey the basic argument of the novel, but "Kurtz's cry", as

Lord argues, "annihilates al1 faith in the meaning of any surface reality". In his

narrative, MarIow repeatedly refers to Kurtz's eloquence and "unextinguishable gift of

noble and lofty expressionn (1 10)- The more Marlow refers to Kurtz's linguistic talents,

the more Our expectation of hearing him speak grows. Yet, what Kurtz finally

pronounces in the novel bodi hstrates our expectations and further bturç our sense of

the logical and the rational. Frustrating the listener's or the reader's yearning for a

logical resolution of Marlow's narrative indicates the impossibility of language to lead

us to a final and definite "disciosure of meaning" (Lord 67). Kurtz's enigmatic and

whisper-like cry does not bring any relief to the reader's thirst for meaning. Nor does it

provide any thematic resolution for the intricately stmctured and multi-layered narrative

of Marlow.

Nonetheless, and despite the unexpectedness and the elusiveness of Kurtz's

cryptic pronouncernent at the end of the novel, one rnay still be allowed to argue that

Kurtz's cry cornes to encapsulate Conrad's attitudes towards the impenalist ideology. In

his tentative explanation of Kurtz's deathbed cry, Marlow suggests that it is the last

pronouncernent of a man who has glimpsed into the horror of his beliefs. "He had

summed up - he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After ail, this

was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a -- - - -

vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed tmth - the

strange commingling of desire and hate" (113). When he first set out on his

expansionist mission, Kurtz, like any representative of the empire, used to be imbued

with what he thought was its illuminating and civilizing ideology. But now, when he

tries to put that ideology into practice, he discovers that the decadence of its moral

foundation is more than language couid express. His last cry, in a sense, represents both

the amorality of such an ideology and his disillusionment in it. It is the cry of someone

who has been trapped by the dubiousness of his own beliefs and values.

Throughout the narrative, Marlow keeps refemng to Kurtz's impressive voice

and "magnificent eloquence". Not until the very end do we have a sense of the man's

physical presence. Yet, it is the presence of a detenorating man who has lost everything,

except the power of his words and the terror in his voice. Marlow feels disappointed

when he realizes that his joumey has been made "for the sole purpose of talking to Mr.

Kurtz. There was a sense of extreme disappointment, as though 1 had found out I had

been striving after sornething dtogether without a substance"(78-9). For Marlow, Kurtz

"presented himself as a voice", Not that his actions are not rernarkable, but his voice

and his discourse have a stronger impact and a greater presence- "The point was in his

being a gifted creature, and that of al1 his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that

carried with it a sense of real presence, was kis ability to talk, his words - the gift of

expression, the bewildering, the iIluminating, the most exalted and the most

contemptible, the pulsating Stream of Iight, or the deceitful fiow from the heart of an

impenetrable darkness (79)."

Lord comments on this passage by affirming that "Marlow's descriptions of

Kurtz stop suggesting that Kurtz is a man of substance.. .and begjn to characterize [him]

in terms of what he Iacks". Our argument here is that the representation of Kurtz as a

voice, a non-substance, underscores the fact that Conrad is more interested in the

character's symbolic function than in the plausibility of his physical existence. If Kurtz

is meant to be the representative of the empire, then one may be allowed to suggest that

reducing him to a mere voice or to a character identifiable only by his discourse

transforms the colonialist ideology symbolically into a mere verbal construct. The

whole set of values underiying the imperialist ideology is thus reduced to a rhetoric that

lacks both genuineness and substance. In this very context: Lord confims that Heart of

D~rkness "documents the transformation of civilized ideals into words that stand alone,

divorced from a meanin@ relation with their referent (61)." In this respect, Ueart of

Darkness could be considered as a post-modern text wherein the world is conceived in

terms of a multitude of signs that have no referential grounds. When the colonial

enterprise fails, al1 that remains are its injuries and its deceptive rhetoric, and the latter

must appear to be a sharn because it is bodiless. When Kurtz is shown in his final

disintegration, al1 that remains of hirn are his floating voice and his fleeting words that

speak of his ignominious failure. While agonizing on his deathbed, Kurtz tries to live

out in his discourse the dreams of his success and to conceal the reality of his failure:

'Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart.

Oh, he struggied! He stxuggied! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now - images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiousIy round his unextinguishable gift of noble and Iofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas - these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz fiequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that sou1 satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of al1 the appearances of success and power (1 IO)."

The scepticisrn that shrouds the colonialist ideology in Conrad's three novels in

question is dso reflected in a narrative technique that rejects the validity of any single

perception of reality. Oftentimes the reader of a novel is unconsciously brought to trust

in the narrator's words and judgments. More often, the narrator is taken to be the

mouthpiece of the author- Heart of Darkness, however, cornes to deconstruct the

traditional concept of a reliable and omniscient narrative voice. From the beginning, we,

as readers, know that we are having a second-hand account of Marlow's story. The

introduction of the frarne narrator, whom Conrad uses in the nove1 and who actually

supposedly repeats Marlow's story, not only weakens the authenticity of Marlow's

narrative but also creates a distance between it and its reader. "Conrad's creation of

Mariow and hïs embedding of Marlow's narrative within another acknowledges that we

perceive the world many times removed, filtered through Our consciousness and that of

others, as though through a glass darkly" (Lord 63-4). The infiltration of Iiis sporadic

comments within the narrative is meant to remind the reader of the relativity and

subjectivity of Marlow's yarn. In his book, Conrad's Ficrion As Critical Discourse

(1991), Richard Ambrosini stresses the significance of the frame narrator's role in

checking the reader's cornplicity or implication withh Marlow's subjective world. "The

frame narrator is drawing the reader's attention to the duality of Marlow's story. He

warns his readers that they rnust not concentrate on Marlow's account of the events in

which he is protagonist, but rather on the distortions which the recreation of his

subjective expenence produces on the narrative" (90).

The unreliability of Marlow as a narrative voice is accentuated not only by the

subjectivity of his account, due to his being the teller and the protagonist of his tale, but

also by the uncertain sources of chat account itself. Marlow's story is largely constituted

of bits and pieces of other stories either reported by other eyewitnesses or overheard by

Marlow himself. In fact, it is the fragmentation of Marlow's text and the multiplicity of

its references that makes Marlow hirnseif unable to give one single interpretation of his

Congo experience. The different and sometimes contradictory nunours and accounts

that he gathers about Kurtz during his journey re-enforces his sease of confusion and

challenges the cogency of his interpretations. If Marlow's impressions of Kurtz keep

changing it is because of the changing "innuendo and rumour that he hears along the

way" (Lord 117). From the antagonism of the manager to the idedisation of the brick

rnaker and the Russian, Kurtz ernerges as an en ipa t ic figure that Marlow has to

understand. But, even at the end of the narrative, when Marlow ultimately meets with

Kurtz, the latter remains, apart from being "a remarkable man", an irnpenetrable and

inscnitable character, and Marlow understands him no more at the conclusion of his

journey than what he did at the beginning. When he hirnself embarks on his narrative,

Marlow dready points out to his listeners that this might be the denouement of his story:

"no clarity or kernel of meaning can be expected to emerge fi-orn his narrative" (Lord

117). Yet, what is of greater significance, he stresses, is the effect his encounter with

Kurtz has had on him.

'1 don? want to bother you much with what happened to me personally....yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how 1 got there, what 1 saw, how 1 went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me - and into my thoughts. Tt was sombre enough too - and pitiful - not extraordinary in any way - not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light'. (21)

Despite its inconclusiveness, Marlow's narrative still creates " a kind of light". It

still suggests a certain tnith. This tmth is that of a highly sceptical world in which man

strives to understand the nature of his existence. If Marlow's journey is a quest for

meaning and order, then the indefiniteness and the arnbiguity of its ending corne to

confirm the absence of any absolute tmth or clear-cut reality. As such the

indeterminacies that characterize Marlow's narrative could be viewed as an

approximation of the indeterminacies of the world it tries to describe- In other words,

Marlow's obscured perception of Kurtz is due to the world of equivocal ideas that Kurtz

himself represents. And if Kurtz is supposed to be the champion of the colonid

enterprise, then his ideas and values are obviously those of the empire. Therefore,

Marlow's inability to understand Kurtz cornes to mean his inability to understand the

world of irnperial values to which he also belongs. The equivocation of the coloniaiist

ideology is reflected in Kurtz's mysterious disintegration and in Marlow's inability to

perceive the dubious moral foundations of such an ideology. The fragmented narrative

structure and its indeterminacies are intended to function as paradigms for the shakiness

of Marlow's perception of the irnperial values and of the values themselves. As such,

the coionialist ideology in Heart of Darkness is reduced to a mere man-made system of

values that is as shaky and unreliable as its rhetorical formulations.

Conrad's narrative technique in Lord Jim also functions in such a way as to lay

bare the questionability and, thus, the untenability of the imperialist ideology. Here

again, as in Heart of Darkness, the lack of a central and authontative point of view is

meant to highiight the absence of one absolute tnrth. The multiplicity of perspectives in

Lord Jim is an indication that truth can take any shape, depending on the one who

perceives it. In this respect, the truth of the eihical purity of the colonial values is being

questioned by the employment of a narrative technique that rejects any epistemological

certainty. The creation of a narrative voice that has only a limited perception of reality

and that shares the same status as the rest of the characters constitutes a departure from

the traditional nineteenth-century concept of an all-knowing narrator. In his edition of

The Cambridge Cornpanion to Joseph Conrad (1996), J . H . Stape points out this

aesthetic innovation in Conrad's novel and considers it as a distinctive feature of the

early modernist text. "Lord Jim", Stape argues, "unflinchingly challenges late

nineteenth-century modes of perception and literary representation" (66). In the

following passage, Stape clearly shows how the narrative structure of Lord Jim

distinguishes it from the other late nineteenth-century literary texts and aligns it with

those early twentieth-century texts that corne to challenge any conclusiveness of

rneaning.

In stnicturïng his novel so as to require repeated readings, Conrad subverts the traditional posture of the mid- and late-Victorian noveiist. In the novels of Thackeray or Trollope the omniscient narrator and 'dear reader' collude to unravel a number of interwoven plots that work towards a predictable conclusion. In contrast, in Lord Jim Conrad eschews the traditional English novel's sub-plotting (so demoostrating a significant formal debt to Continental, especially French, fiction) and makes a number of complicated demands that deliberately, almost aggressively, seek to unsettle the reader. In the end, these technical manoeuvres place the reader in a position of fundamental relativism and puzzled incertitude about the meanings unfolded by Marlow's compulsive telling of Jim's tale, (67)

To bend Stape's views to our purposes, we could contend that the "deliberate

inconclusiveness of meaning" (Stape 76) that Conrad tries to establish in Lord Jim also

means that such values and ideals as those advanced by the empire are neither

conclusive nor irrefütable. The failure, or let us Say the failures, of Jim to put them into

practice is sufficient evidence of their imperfection and unreliability. In îhis very

context, Stape confirrns that, "poised at the close of an increasingly sceptical century,

Lord Jim exposes the series of cultural illusions of which Jirn is the heir, symbol, and

victim" (69). Following upon this argument, we could Say that lim, like Kurtz in Heart

of Darkness, is both the representative and the victim of an extremely elusive system of

imperial values. His disintegration, like that of Kurtz, is caused by his inability to see

the duplicity underlying the surface reality of such a system.

Here again, in Solitude versus SoLidurity, Lord tries to demonstrate how the

narrative complexities of Lord Jim reflect the relativity of uuth in generd and,

consequently, the relativity of imperial values in pafiicular: "[TJ he doubt-ridden

narrative complexity, which expresses the epistemological theme of the elusiveness of

truth, is in turn paradigmatic of the self-doubt and incipient failure of imperialism; a

failure that results fiom the shaky intellectual and social foundations upon which it rests,

as well as the dubious mentality of those who support and profit from it" (147). As in

Heart of darkness, the anonymous frame narrator in Lord Jim is introduced in order to

create a distance between the reader and Marlow's story as weil as to undermine the

complete vdidity of that story.

Apart from presenting us with Jim's formative years in seamanship in a

buildungsroman fashion, the £rame narrator also draws the reader's attention to what

could be viewed as a thematic leitmotif, namely the complexity and ambiguity of human

experîence. To develcp this leitmotif, Conrad adopts introspection, which is one of the

Stream of consciousness techniques by which the character's state of mind and feelings

are exposed to us in a narrative mode. In fact, Conrad makes his frarne narrator delve

into Jim's mind dunng the inquiry and pronounce a fulminahg diatribe against the

Gradgrind-Iike magistrates and ail those who accept no other truth but the truth of facts.

They wanted facts! Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything! .. . After his first feeiing of revolt he had corne round to the view that only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror beyond the appalling face of things. The facts those men were eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in space and time, r e q w n g of their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisibIe, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent sou1 in a detestable body. (29-31)

From the very b e g i ~ i n g of Lord Jim, and before Marlow undertalces in i t the narrating

of the story, the fiame narrator, as in the passage just quoted, casts the reader into a

world of highly subjective redity. Jim's perception of his experience is obviously

different from that of the magistrates who are called upon to judge what happened to

him in his imperial adventure. Later, Marlow, on his part, will be struggling to have a

clear perception of that experience too. But from the beginning of the novel till its end,

no mode of perception is ever presented as valid or self-evident. The sense of enigma

and indecipherability keeps gyrating around Jim's character d l along the narrative.

The relativity of truth is fûrther stressed in Lord Jim when we realize that

Marlow's narrative is itself a composite of other different and incomplete tales

conceming Jim. The discrepancies arnong the testirnonies of the witnesses to the Patna

incident in the novel and between Marlow's own interpretations themselves of Jim7s

deeds challenge our sense of truth and logic. We also cal1 into question the validity of

Marlow's moral judgement as soon as we are introduced to those of Stein, a wealthy,

experienced and wise merchant in the East, to whom Marlow turns for advice and with

whom he arranges the expedition of Jim to Patusan. Embedding the tales of these

witnesses into Marlow's narrative and Marlowys attempt at re-constructing and

interpreting hem reveds the multifaceted nature of truth and its evasiveness. Marlow

himself often and again acknowledges the elusiveness of absolute tnith. In his interview

with Stein, he struggles to reach a clear-cut perception of Jirn and to form a convincing

interpretation of the man's existence and experience.

At that moment it was difncult to beIieve in Jim's existence - starting from a country personage, blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material world - but his impenshable reality came to me with a convincing, with an irresistible force! 1 saw it vividly, as though in our progress through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. (216)

Lord argues that the witnesses in the trial held by the magistrates "provide the fabnc

fiom which Marlow's composite narrative is woven. They are the performers, he the

intricate choreographer who endeavours to find or create order and meaning from the

collage of subjective viewpoints, By their existence they remind us of the relativity of

truth, and help us to maintain a detached perspective" (157).

As described by Lord, the intncate narrative structure of Lord Jirn not only blurs

our perception of truth but also compels us even to question the tenability of Jirn's ideals

and beliefs. Jirn's moral crisis is due to his reluctance to see the impracticality of his

ideals. More specifically, Jim's failure in both the Patna and the Patusan episodes of the

novel is the resuit of his persistence in seeing the world in terms of what he reads in

imperial advenhire books. In these books is found the irnperial image of the white

European hero whose courage and honour are beyond questioning. Jim, as a matter of

fact, falls victim to this mythoiogization of the imperial protagonist in the adventure

books he is avidly reading. As early as the opening chapter of Lord Jim, the frame

narrator informs the reader of the world of romantic ideals which Jim has created for

himself and in which he has decided to seek adventure and glory.

On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget himself, and beforehand Iive in his mind the sea-Ise of Iight literature. He saw hirnself saving people fiom sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurrïcane, M m m i n g through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and h d f naked, walking on uncovered reefs and search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled rnutinies on the hi@ seas, and in a smali boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men - dways an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book. (6)

In a sense, Jim's failure to live as an imperial hero underlines the discrepancy

between what imperialism pretends to be in the literature it produces and what it turns

out to be when its ideds are put into practice. To pursue Our argument further, we could

Say that Lord Jim is somehow a counter-narrative to al1 that coIonial Iiterature which

presents the colonial protagonist under an aura of valour and honour. As such the novel

is rneant to be both a linguistic and thematic deconstruction of the coloriialist discourse.

As in Heart of Darkrzess, the hero in Lord Jim is the victim of the dubiousness of the

. irnperialist discourse and its moral foundations- And in both works, the complex

narrative structure is meant to disrnantie and demythologize this discourse.

In Victory, although the narrative stmchre is less intricate and less challenging

than it is in the two previous novels, it still functions in such a way as to reflect upon the

doubt-ndden morality of the imperial enterprise. Our task in this chapter, however, is

not to trace Conrad's anti-coIonialist views, for these will be explored in the space of the

corning chapters- What we wish to demonstrate here, rather, is how the Ianguage and

the narrative technique of each novel corne to underscore the sceptical nature of the

imperial ideology as Conrad understood it.

The opening passage of Victory is of great significance for this insofar as it draws

the reader's attention to the arbitrary relationship between the sign and its referent in

language. In the following passage Conrad attempts to highlight the link between the

precious and tempting value of coai and diamond, despite their different chemical

composition and characteristics, and the imperial mission, which consists in taking

possession of those raw rnaterials. At first glance, this passage seems to the reader quite

peculiar, for, in it, the anonymous narrator engages in a pseudo-scientific study of the

"chemical relation between coal and diamond" (3). If coal is "fascinating" and diamond

is "mystical", it is not because of the chemical constituents of each, but rather because

we, as human beings, have invested them with such qualities. Outside our system of

Iinguistic signification, coal and diarnond are no more than two stones of certain similar

chemical features. It is what these two substances represent, and not what they really

are, which constitutes their real value to us. Commenting on the significance of this

passage, Erdinast-Vulcan puts the emphasis on language as a system of arbitrary signs

that shapes and defines human perception of reaiity. She believes that "coal and

diarnond are related to each other not, as one might expect f i e r having read the opening

sentence, by an elaborate expianation of the 'very dose chernical relation' which links

them, but by the fact that 'both these commodities represent wedth' (Erdinast-Vulcan's

emphasis). "The focus? then," she argues, " is not on a common chernical essence but on

the quality of representation" (172). Thus, the relationship between the material

substance and its semiotic representation is revealed to be "arbitrary and entirely

artificid" (Erdinast-Vulcan 173). And it is according to these "arbitrary and entirely

artificiai" conceptions of the matenal world in Conrad's view of imperïal ideology that

man undertakes and justifies his actions. Therefore, any human enterprise, based on

these shaky foundations, including the imperial enterprise itself, should not be expected

to last for long. In Victory, the liquidation of the Tropical Belt Cod Company strikingly

testifies to this.

The unreliability of language as a mode of representation, to which Conrad's

anonymous narrator alludes in the opening passage of Vic~ory, will be a key element in

our understanding of Heyst, the novel's hero, and his philosophy of detachment.

Because reality is only a verbal construct set up by limited and failibXe humans, then the

search for any absolute truth is futile and will inevitably corne to naught. It is, in fact, in

the light of language conceived in this fashion that we should perceive Heyst's

disenchantment in the efliciency of the human endeavour. "This form of unbelief',

Erdinast-Vulcan contends, "is an early version of post-modernist textuality, a view of

the world as an infinite series of signs without an ultirnate referent, and a condemnation

of essentialism as a falsified conception of life" (173-4). It is in the rejection of ethical

certaùities and the beIief in epistemological relativism that the three novels of Our shidy

do converge in order to refute the alleged moral validity of the imperial enterprise.

The narrative structure of Victory, like that of Heurt of Darkness and Lord Jim, is

symptomatic of "the conception of al1 human enterprise as an illusory construct"

(Erdinast-Vulcan 184). The constant shift fkom a first-person mode of narration ro an

omniscient one brings about a discontinuity in the narrative. This discontinuity is

actually meant to emphasise the subjectivity of tnith and its vaciilating nature. It is dso

meant to restrain the reader's attention in order to prevent it from being directly involved

in the world of relativism and scepticism presented by the narrative. The author's

purpose behind this mode of narration is to make the reader as detached from the work

as Heyst is from the world. Yet, even Heyst's detachment is not recommended, for it is

revealed to be a cornmitment to a single Iife philosophy: "the philosophy of total

negation" (Erdinast-Vulcan 174). The implication of the reader in the narrative means

that he cornes to adopt a spe~i f ic perspective from which his identifications and

judgrnents are produced. And to be entrapped in this subjective mode of perception is as

undesirable as Heyst's arrogant obsession with a single world-view. That the novel ends

with the first-person narrator reporting Davidson's last word, "Nothing!", indicates that

no one version of truth can ever be considered as the final one. Even Heyst's belief that

social aloofness is the one single resolution for a desperate human condition proves to be

ineffective and fatal. In "the thoughtful sadness of the closing negation", as R.W.B.

Lewis puts it, "there lies the tmth of Victory, and its reality" (Karl 101). As such, the

language of Victory cornes to compose and decompose itself. It constructs its

assumptions and deconsiructs them to leave the reader engulfed by indeterminacies and

uncertainties-

The conception of epistemological ambiguity is in the end what Conrad's

discourse in the three novels cornes to confirrn. In fact, if there is anything that may

align Conrad along with the early twentieth-century Modernist writers, it is his

insistence on echoing the ethical scepticism of his age. The uncertainty, and, thus, the

unreliability of any human construct corne to be the common belief of that age. In the

context of the three novels we are considering, the ideology underlying colonialism and

imperialism is as fragile and unreliable as any other human construct. Conrad expresses

this by adopting a wide variety of narrative strategies, an artistic gesture that creates a

multifaceted and highly subjective reality. The absence of a central narrative authority

that one may trust indicates that there is no single version of tmth- Tmth is reduced to

no more than a mere linguistic fabrication that each fallible man understands "after the

fashion of his own folly and conceit". In Neart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory, the

elusiveness of the word goes hand in hand with the elusiveness of the imperid ideology,

for both are revealed to be concomitant human constructs.

Chapter III

Stereotypical Perception of the Indigene

In the previous chapter, we tried to describe the nature of Conrad's anti-

imperialism by showing that the imperial enterprise must be regarded as a political

system founded on principles of scepticism as much as the language that gives it

expression. The nurnerous arnbiguities and indeterminacies of Conrad's discourse in the

three novels under study corne to imply that the basic moral foundations of imperialism

are questionable, doubtful and equivocal. What we propose to do in this chapter is to

push Our argument further in order to uncover the real ideological, conceptual and

psychological foundations upon which the colonizer establishes his own colonial

assumptions. In fact, our attempt here aims at revealing that the real and latent idea

behind colonial practices stems basically from a falsified perception of the colonized.

Essentially, the colonizer often considers himself as the one destined to carry out a

mission that is Christianizing and civilizing in other less civifized or primitive regions of

the world. The obvious presumption is that if the native is reduced to subjection, i t is for

his own benefit. For the colonizer will bless him with the light of Christianity and will

bestow upon him the virtues of Western civilization. Saying this does not mean that we

condemn Judeo-Christian belief, or that we consider Western civilization less worthy

than that of an indigenous race, or that this civilization is not a great one. What we wish

to argue, however, is that this kind of rhetoric in Western civilization seemed, until

recently in any case, to take for granted the supposed irrefutable inherent superiorïty of

the colonizer and the equally bottorniess inferiorïty of the colonized. And this rhetonc

becomes the more dangerous when it tries to justify and legitimize imperial exploitation.

Even more dangerous is when this superionty cornplex is to be based on mere racial,

religious and cultural differences. Our contention, therefore, (and it is certainly

Conrad's), is that there is nothing more obnoxious and repulsive than the subjugation of

peoples for the simple reason that they believe in different religions, hold different

cultures, or have different skin colour. We will attempt to explore the dynamics of this

misperception and its repercussions on both colonized md colonizer as Conrad

expresses it in the three novels that are the subject of this thesis.

In the beginning it is important to note that any impenal enterprise is always

preceded in time and supported by a whole rhetoric concerning the people to be

subjugated. In fact, it is this rhetoric that serves as the first justification for colonization.

It is noteworthy that this rhetoric in world history has repeatedly depended on certain

stereotypes about the people to be colonized. These stereotypes constitute a

considerable and essential part of impenal ideology and have provided the basis for

imperial expansion. In other words, the colonizer creates and accumulates a certain

number of Fied and fetishized images of the native that makes his colonial intervention

legitimate and most expedient. The creation and perpetuation of such stereotypes are

crucial because they serve the colonizer not o d y as a preparation for his colonial

enterprise but also as a vindication against any forthcoming accusation of violent action.

Thus, if one wants to reach a better understanding of impenalism and its real values, one

rnust first start by studying its discursive as well as ideologicaI stereotypes.

In the introduction of his book, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature

in Colonial Africa, Abdul R. JanMohamed characterizes the relationship between the

colonizer and the colonized as a Manichean one- This means that in a colonial context,

the colonizer is to be the epitome of virtue and goodness, whereas the colonized is to be

the epitome of corruption and evil. In Africa, for instance, the black native stands for

everything negative in the human being, whilsi the white settler stands for everything

positive. "The colonial mentality", JanMohamed contends, '5s dominated by a

[Mlanichean allegory of white and black, good and evil, salvation and damnation,

civilization and savagery, superiority and inferiority, intelligence and emotion, self and

other, subject and object" (4). To corroborate his idea about the Manichean world of

coloniaiism, JanMohamed quotes kom The Wretched of the Earth, a work by Frantz

Fanon, an important writer and critic in this field:

The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physicdly, that is to Say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil .... The native is decIared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. (3-4)

It is, therefore, according to a system of conceptuai binary oppositions that the colonial

situation and the colonial enterprise are to be determined and studied.

Yet, the colonial situation is more complex and more multifaceted than it appears

to be. For the apparent Manichean distinction between colonizer and colonized seems to

hide another concomitant and inevitable relationship of dependency. As for the

colonizer, he is dependent on the colonized because it is through the continuous

subjugation of the latter that his social and moral superiority is ensured. For "if he

genuinely pursues his manifest destiny and 'civilizes' the native, then he undermines his

own position of social pnvilege" (JanMohamed, 5). In other words, although the

colonizer is more or Iess convinced of the degradation and evil nature of the native, he

depends on the continued infenonty of that native in order to maintain his superionty.

As for the coionized, he, too, is faced with the difficuity of choosing between two

equally undesirable options. On the one hand, if he chooses to emulate the culture of the

settler in order to do away with the inferiority complex that the colonizer has created in

hirn, then he wiH be severed from his own culture and obviously from his own people.

On the other hand, if he sticks to his indigenous culture and tradition, then he will

confirrn the settler's image of him as a retarded individual and, thus, needs to be

colonized in order to be civilized (JanMohamed, 5). "Thus deprived of his own culture

and prevented from participating in that of the colonizer", JanMohamed maintains, "the

native loses his sense of historical direction and soon his initiative as welI" (5). Being

caught and lost in this web of mingled and unsuitable choices, the native becomes "more

vulnerable to further subjugation" (5)-

If we try to trace the manifestations of such a situation, we will find them deeply

rooted in a large number of colonialist . discourses, inciuding literary fictional texts.

What needs to be emphasized here is the crucial importance of such colonialist

discourses in reinforcing and supporting coionialist action that d l take the form of

either political or military intervention. In this way, the rhetorical as weI1 as the political

converge and coalesce in the service of the same idea and the same pnnciple, namely,

economic exploitation. But we have to keep in mind that political or military action is

only a short-term strategy in the whole imperial project. What is more durable and less

eradicable is the colonialist rhetoric that predates and outdates any f o m of politicai or

mili tary manipulation. It is those ideological stereotypes about the colonized, which the

colonialist discourse has created and developed, that will maintain their indubitable

presence in the colonizer's mind even after decolonisation. Hence, the study of this

discourse and the stereotypes that it creates and perpetuates wiIl allow us to have deeper

insigh ts into the d ynamics and implications of colonialism.

In yet another of his writings, an essay entitled "The Economy of Manichean

Allegory: The Function of Racial Drfference in Colonial Literature", which appears in

Henry Louis Gates' collection of critical essays, "Race", Writing and Difference (1986),

JanMoharned puts the emphasis on two inseparably intertwined aspects of coionization.

One is political and economic. The other is discursive and rhetoncai. For him, each one

is "sedimented in" and feeds upon the other. He insists that one, for example, can better

understand the colonialist discourse if one tries to trace and detect "its ideological

function in relation to actual imperial practices" and vice versa (80). According to

JanMohamed, the political and economic aspects of colonialism are involved in what he

calls its "covert aim", whereas the discursive and rhetorical aspects of colonialism are

involved in what he calis its "overt aimy'. What is covert is the malignant exploitation of

the colony's natural resources through political and economic manipulation. What is

overt, however, is that alleged discourse and rhetoric pretend to "civilize" the savage by

introducing hirn to "the benefits of Western culturen (81)- Colonialist Iiterary works

such as those of Rudyard Kipling are overt assertions that the native needs to be

colonized in order for him to be civilized, In this context, JanMohamed calls into

question the truth of such texts and draws the reader's attention to their real implications.

"The fact that this overt aim, embedded as an assumption in colonialist literature, is

accompanied in colonialist texts by a more vociferous insistence, indeed by a fixation,

upon the savagery and evilness of the native should der t us to the real function of these

texts: to justify imperid occupation and exploitation" (JanMohamed, 81).

JanMohamed goes on arguing that the indigene has always been misrepresented

in most colonialist texts. Indeed, this misrepresentation seems to be encourâged by two

main factors- The first is that "linguistic barriers" make such texts inaccessible to the

native. The second is that such texts are produced for a "European audience" that '%as

no direct contact with the native" and that, consequently, is ready to consume and

assimilate those texts at their face value (82). In such a way, îhe native turns out to be

an object that is exploited not only economically but also literarily and discursively.

"Just as the imperialists 'administer' the resources of the conquered country, so

colonialist discourse 'commodifies' the native subject into a stereotyped object and uses

him as a 'resourcey for coIonialist fiction" (JanMoharned, 83). Here JanMohamed joins

Homi Bhabha when the latter asserts that "the objective of colonial discourse is to

constnte the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin,

in order to justify conquest and to establish systerns of administration and instruction"

(70). Through such a strategy of discursive and fictional "cornmodification", the

colonialist writer helps in and facilitates the physical that is, the economic exploitation

of the native,

JanMoharnedYs contention that colonialist literature contributes considerably in

rendering imperial practices most effective brings us back to what Edward Said, a

leading con temporary post-colonial cri tic, has said about the European perception of the

Orient. In his most remarkable and most insightful book, Orientalism (1978), Said

explores in depth and defines the nature of the Occident's stereotypical perception of the

Orient. However, before we can explain for the sake of this thesis what Orientalism

means and implies in Said's view, we must make clear here that we are using the term

"Orient" to designate the "Other", that is, everything which is not Western, In the

context of Our study, "the Orient" will designate not only the East but entire subjected

races as we11, The word Orientalism is used in this fashion here because most of what

Said says in his book about the Orient applies mutatis mutandis to dl those who have

been or still are subject to the Western imperial hegernony.

In the introduction of his book, Said calls "anyone who teaches, writes about, or

researches into the Orient - and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist,

sociologist, historian, or phiIologist - ...an Orientakt and what he or she does is

Orientalism" (2). Bq. Orientalism, Said does not mean the Orient's knowledge of itself

but rather the Occident's knowledge of the Orient. This definition implies that

Orientalism is al1 that "library or archive of information commonly and, in some of its

aspects, unanimously held" by the Occident (41). In other words, Orientalism is the

Occident's ideological construction of the Orient. What we deern it interesting to note

about this ideological construction is that it makes the Orient or the Other stand for

everything that is not Occidental or Western. This means that the Orient is defined and

determined only by its opposite position to the West. If the West stands for goodness,

the Orient stands for eviI. If the West stands for civilization and progress, the Onent

stands for savagery and primitivism. If the West stands for rationalism, the Orient

stands for mysticism, and so on and so forth. It is dong these binary oppositions,

therefore, that the Orient cornes to be represented and identified in the Western

consciousness.

It is vital to remind ourselves, however, that this mode of perception has not been

developed in an "archival vacuum" (Said, 13). In Orientalism, Said traces its existence

back to the medieval period, through the Renaissance, through the subsequent centuries,

especially when European imperialism was at its peak, to our contemporary period.

Each phase of this historical movement was characterized by a continuous struggle

between West and East for knowledge and power. What is most noteworthy in this

respect, however, is the fact that the West's antagonism to the Orient has always been

accompanied by a sort of fascination vis-à-vis the Onent. From the time of the

Cmsades onwards, the West has been attempting to corne to ternis with this repulsive

and at the same tirne attractive Orient No one c m deny the fact that in certain periods

of human history the East was held to be the cradle of civilization and knowledge.

Suffice it to name Arabia, Ancient Egypt, Persia and Mesopotarnia to have images of

great civilizations awakened in our rnernory. Suffice it to name the epic of Gilgamesh,

Avicenna "the prince of physicians", and Averroes "the father of Scholasticism", to have

works and figures of unquestioned artistic and intellectual authority evoked in Our

minds.

Out of this struggle between East and West for knowledge and power, there

emerged a whole body of European literary productions that came to define and

conceive of the Orient as the West's "complementary opposite" (Said, 58). Said's

comment in this respect shows how a distinct Orientalist literature has developed out of

a long historical exchange, and sometimes animosity, between the West and the East:

Consider how the Orient, and in particular the Near Orient, becarne known in the West as its great complementary opposite since antiquity. There were the Bible and the rise of Christianity; there were travellers like Marco Polo who charted the trade routes and pattemed a regulated system of commercial exchange, and after hirn Lodovico di Vartherna and Pietro della Valle; there were fabulists like Mandeville; there were the redoubtable conquering Eastern movements, principdly Islam, of course; there were the militant pilgrirns, chiefly the Crusaders. Altogether an intemally stmctured archive is built up from the literature that belongs to these experiences. Out of this cornes a restncted number of typical encapsulations: the joumey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the poIemical confrontation. These are the ienses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter behveen East and West. (58)

For almost ten centuries, from the second half of the seventh century, after the prophet

Mohamed's death, till the late seventeenth century, when the Ottoman Empire started

crumbling, Islam constituted a "constant danger7' that "lurked alongside Europe" (Said,

59). In fact, this danger was real and not imaginary, and Islam did try to occupy Europe

ihrough its invasion of Spain, as did the Ottoman Empire by its attacks on Near-Eastern

Europe. Faced with this growing hegemony, due in part to its own imagination and to

real Islamic attacks, "Europe could respond with very little except fear and a kind of

awe" (Said, 59). This fear of being overpowered by an unknown devastating conquering

force uifIuenceci and shaped the European's way of representing the East. Said's

comment on Dante's representation of Muslirns, and the prophet Mohamed in particular,

in his Divine Comeciy makes it a case in point:

"Maomettom - Mohammed - turns up in canto 28 of the Inferno. He is located in the eighth of the ninth circles of Heu, in the ninth of the ten BoIgias of Malebolge, a circle of gloomy ditches surrounding Satan's stronghold in Hell. Thus before Dante reaches Mohammed, he passes through circles containhg people whose sins are of a lesser order: the lustful, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the heretics, the wrathfil, the suicidd, the biasphemous. Afier Mohammed there are only the falsifiers and the treacherous (who include Judas, Bnitus, and Cassius) before one arrives at the very bottom of Hell, whîch is where Satan hirnself is to be found. Mohamed thus belongs to a ngid hierarchy of evils, in the category of what Dante caik seminator di scandalo e di scisma. Mohammed's punishment, which is aiso his eternal fate, is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart, (68)

Our purpose in this chapter is not to give a detailed and in-depth analysis of the

West's perception of Islam and Muslims in any particular way, but rather to trace and to

demonstrate how the West has developed a certain mode of looking at and representing

everything that rnight threaten the hegemony of its beliefs, its culture, and its identity.

In fact, this attitude towards IsIam and Muslim tradition is only an illustration of how the

West came to confine anything dien to its culture, partly through its own fault and parcly

through the fault of Islam, into fixed stereotypes. Far more significant is that this

stereotypical fixation of the unknown Other turns out to be an integral part of a larger

project that aims at re-asserting European hegemony and keeping the Other at bay. In

order to make this Other "Iess fearsome" (Said, 60) and, thus, more controllable, the

West had to acquire a certain knowledge of it, For one cannot dominate what one does

not know. Knowledge means power. Here again, Said brilliantly identifies the dialectic

of knowledge and power as far as Western-Eastern relationship is concerned:

"knowledge of subject races or Orientais is what makes their management easy and

profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in

an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control" (36). In a sense, the

more you h o w and expose the Other, the more you make it vulnerable and defenceless.

As such, Orientalism cornes to mean "the discipline by which the Orient was (and is)

approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery, and practice" (Said, 73).

This discipline, as a matter of fact, designates and encornpasses al1 those texts - whether

they are of an historical, sociological, ethnological, or literary nature - written about the

Orient or the Other-

If we look closely at our novels in question, we certainly frnd ample evidences

for this contradiction in the West's view of the Other, In Heart of Darkness, for

instance, the dialectic of attraction and repulsion, of fascination and fear, is visible in

Conrad's development of his characters, both European and Afr-ican. Conrad, in this

novel, questions the superiority of the white race by exposing to u s its incongrnous

perception of the black Mrican. This incongruity is noticeable in Conrad's depiction of

the Congo jungle and its inhabitants. In fact, what captivates and yet frightens Marlow

the European is how the wildemess and the African natives corne to merge and acquire

interchangeable characteristics:

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty Stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest -... We were wanderers on the prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet ... there would be a giimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet starnping, of bodies swaying, of eyes roiliog under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage- The steamer boiied aIong slowly on the edge of a black and incornprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings (Finchman and Hooper, 102-3).

The importance of this passage is that it shows how the wildemess and its black Afncan

dwellers are perceived as an indissoluble entity. Humans become part of nature and

nature acquires human attributes. In the Congo jungle the human and the non-human are

fused into one body that is both frightening and fascinating to Marlow the European

outsider. While such natural elements as vegetation, earth and trees are

anthropomorphized, such human beings as the black natives are stnpped of their

distinguishing human qualities. On this "prehistoric earth", vegetation revolts, whereas

"the big trees" reign as "kings". As for the human beings, that is, the dwellers of this

"prehistoric earth", are reduced to a mere mass of "black Iirnbs", to "hands clapping",

"feet stampingy', "bodies swaying" and "eyes rolling". Their speech is no more than an

'cincomprehensible fienzy". The black native emerges to Marlow as prehistoric as the

jungle he inhabits. In his description of the native and his land, Marlow perceives no

distinguishing boundaries between them. It is this unbreakable and also

incomprehensible bond between the black native and his land that challenges the

understanding of the white Marlow. It is because of this inscrutability and because of

this mystique, which Conrad invests upon the black native in relation to his natural

milieu, that the white European starts perceiving them in t ems of both fear and

fascination.

Ln the sarne way, the dialectic of desire and derision is also noticeable in

MarIowYs description of the black native woman, supposedly Kurtz's mistress.

Although she is never referred to as a "mistress" in the narrative, the black wornan is

developed and depicted as a figure "embodying physicd temptation and sexual

gratification for the white male European" (Finchman and Hooper, 104). in many

"nineteenth-century European narratives", Fothergill con£irms, the figure of the black

native woman frequently rneans "sexual licence" (103). But what is rnost noteworthy is

that such "truth" is hardly articulated in these European narratives in any acute or crystal

clear manner. This is because the colonial European stereotype prevents the possibility

of being sexuaily attracted to what it considers an inferior race (104). In this sense,

"what fascinates and terrifies the colonizing rnind was the thought that the white man

might 'go native', cross the limits of the pemissible and undermine the sexual

foundation of the bourgeois -worldW (Finchman and Hooper, 104-5). In Marlow's

account of the black woman, one Fmds the manifestations of this dialectic of fear and

fascination:

'She walked with measured steps, draped in stnped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witchmen, that hung about her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something orninous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal

body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul. (99)

Like the rest of the natives, the black woman is both terrifying and fascinating because

she appears to the European observer as neither a human nor a non-human. She is

depicted by Marlow here as a woman wamor but whose power is far from being an

earthly one. Her physical presence evokes in Marlow's mind her metaphysical power:

"bizarre things, charms, @fis of witchrnen, that hung about her." Marlow, when he first

catches sight of ùlis woman, describes her as a "wild and gorgeous apparition" (99). No

matter how thorough and detaiIed Marlow's physical description of her is, she remains a

rnere "apparition", a ghostly figure, both temfying and attractive. The physical reaiity

of the bIack woman is valid only in terms of its metaphysical suggestions to Marlow's

perceiving European mind. Without these, she has no corporeal existence and

significance. The black native woman has no autonomously substantial and physical

reality because she is rneant to function as an imaginative object of the European's

desire and as a threat if that desire is transformed into blunt sexual licence. Here again,

Conrad, by introducing such a figure in his narrative, brings to light the dialectic of fear

and fascination which characterizes the colonizer's perception of the indigenous Other.

The fact that a wide range of studies of the Other organized in Western academic

institutions was intended to serve the avowed project of making it easier to attack and to

absorb intellectudly has engendered many misrepresentations and falsified conceptions

of it. Moreover, because of cultural and geographical distances and because of linguistic

barriers, the West's conception of the Other, like the perception that any other part of the

world wouId have of another under the sarne circurnstances, cannot possibly be a

comprehensive, true and genuine one. Hence, as Said contends, most of the Orientalist

texts, that is, texts produced by the West about the Orient, deal more with the West's

perception of the Onent than with what the Orient really is. Said calls this "the

exteriority of representation", which means that the Onentalist text can on no account be

true to the real nature of the Onent because ir is often produced from outside the Orient

and according to the West's own system of beliefs and values. "Orientalism", Said

contends, "is premised upon extenonty, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or

scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mystenes for and to the

West" (20-1, my italics). Using its own system of signification, the West finds itself

unrestrained in dovetailing the image of the Orient and rnaking it fit its own intentions

and designs. Said, in this respect, emphasizes the importance of language as a highly

biased device in the process of representation:

It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. The reai value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Onent therefore relies very Iittle, and cannot instr~mentally depend, on the Orient as such---. [Tlhat Orientalisrn makes sense at dl depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, "there" in discourse about it. (21-2)

If the Orient can have any identity in Orientalist texts, it is an identity filtered

therefore through Western lenses. 'What gave the Oriental's worId its intelligibility and

identity was not the result of his own efforts but rather the whole complex series of

knowledgeable manipulations by which the Onent was identified by the West" (Said,

40). The works of such writers and poets as Lord Byron, William Beckford, Goethe,

Victor Hugo, Gerard de Nervel, Gustave Flaubert and Pierre Loti reflect more their

personal visions of the Orient than the reaiity of the Orient itself. Such writers

"restmctured the Orient by their art and made its colors, lights, and people through their

images, rhythms, and motifs. At rnost, the 'rea17 Onent provoked a writer to his vision;

it very rarely guided it" (Said, 22). Even though some of these writers lived for a while

in the Orient and experienced things Oriental, one should not deny the fact that they

came to the Onent with an Occidental background and wrote about it in terms of and in

cornparison with their own culture and values.

If then the West tries to acquire certain knowledge about the Oriental Other in

order to make it less menacing, and since this knowledge is not really accessible at first

hand, due to cultural, geographical, and linguistic barriers, it has literally had to create

that knowledge. Here we should bear in mind, as Said contends, that the Orient is

unfamiliar to the West not only as a culture but also as a geographical space. It is a

space that is as inscrutable as the culture of those who inhabit it. What is most

noteworthy, and yet most dangerous for a proper understanding of the East in this

respect, is that the desire to uncover and to familiarize oneself with an unknown

geographical space grows into a greedier desire to control it. The desire to know is

transformed into a legitimate right to monopolize. And what comes to justify this

monopoly is the contention or the belief that this space is evil, We are saying this

because one is proue to associate what one does not know more with eviI than with

good- If we ask sorneone what he fears most, he would answer: "the unknown". Parents

often warn their children not to talk to strangers- Said considers the association of the

distant and unknown geographical space with evil as utterly imaginative and arbitrary,

that is, a mere fiction that has no concrete bases. He writes:

It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and these objects, while appearîng to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the temtory beyond, which they cal1 "the land of barbariansn. In other words, this universal practice of designahg in one's mind a familiar space which is "ours" and an unfamiliar space beyond "ours" which is "theirs" is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. 1 use the word "arbitrary" here because imaginative geography of the "our land-barbarian land" variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. (54)

As such, the unknown land and the people who dwell in it corne to be put into the same

basket. If the land is viewed as a place of danger and evil, then its inhabitants too are

dangerous and evil. The same applies to the Orient. Said contends that "al1 the latent

and unchanging characteristics of the Orient stood upon, were rooted in, its geography.

Thus.. .the geographical Orient nourished its inhabitants, guaranteed their

characteristics, and defined their specificity" (21 6) .

It is on such assumptions, that is, the evil of what is distant and what is

unfamiliar, that imperialiçm comes to set up its ideologies and justify its practices.

Worse than this is when such assumptions are to be supported and intensified "not only

by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course, by the Darwinian theses on

survival and natural selection" (Said, 227). In Heart ofDarkness, Conrad says that what

justifies or what "redeems" the colonial effort is "the idea": "The conquest of the earth,

which mostly means the taking it away fiom those who have a different complexion or

stightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

What redeems it is the idea ody. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence

but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow

down before, and offer a s a d c e to-. ." (20). In a sense, what justifies the imperial

enterprise is a steadfast beIief in an irrevocabie and unquestionable idea. It is the idea

that coIonization may be jcstified if it means "the taking away" of a land inhabited by

uncivilized people. It is the idea that makes the West the centre and al1 the rest the

periphery. It is the idea that Marlow reveals to us when, as a child, he Iooks at the map

and h d s out that every region on the earth that remains unexplored by Europe is drawn

as blank space:

'Wow when 1 was a Iittle chap I had a passion for maps. 1 would look for hours at South Amerka, or Africa, or Australia, and Iose myself in the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting (but they d l look that) 1 would put my finger on it and Say, when 1 grow up 1 will go there." (21-22)

M e r he goes to these places as an adult, Marlow realizes how this blankness turns into

darkness: "True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since

my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of

delightful mystery - a white patch for a boy to dream gionously over. It had becorne a

place of darkness" (22). He realizes that, to use Jacques Darras's terms, "it is no longer

the game of the quest but of the conquest", and that "it is no longer a question of the

heart of the darkness but of the darkness of the heart" (42-3). Moreover, the idea to

which Conrad refers rneans that "the conquest of the earth", the greed for geographical

expansion, c m be veiled under such a '%entimental pretence" as "the White Man's

Burden" or "the civilizing mission". "The important thing", as Said puts it, "was to

dignify simple conquest with an idea, to turn the appetite for more geographical space

into a theory about the special relationship between geography on the one hand and

civilized and uncivilized peoples on the other" (216). In a word, it is the idea that both

justifies and dignifies the imperial project.

Said's resourceful study of Orientdism as a discourse that refiects the West's

biased perception of the Orient has opened up new avenues in the field of colonial and

post-colonial studies. In fact, the originality of Said's contribution to Our understanding

of Western colonialism was to initiate the idea that such colonidism is essentially a

psychological phenomenon. Of course, there was before him Octave Mannoni and his

pioneenng work, Prospero and Caliban: the Psychology of Colonization (1950), which

explores the different psychological aspects and echoes of a colonial encounter taking

the Malagasies as its case study. Then, there was Frantz Fanon, whose Black Skin m i t e

Masks revised Mannoni's work and scrutinized acutely the psychological dimensions of

ethnicity and racisrn insofar as the black African is concerned- But what Said presents

the reader with in Orientalkm is a multi-dimensional and a more comprehensive study

that includes and incorporates the black experience altogether into a larger framework,

narnely, colonization and imperialism- His basic contention is that "European culture

gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of

surrogate and even underground self' (3). To make this clear, we should first remind

ourselves that what justifies colonization is the common pretence that it is profitable for

both colonizer and colonized. More specifically, the argument often brandished to

justify colonization is that the indigene cannot achieve the starus of a civilized individual

unless he is guided and taught by sorneone who is dready civilized. What we shall

attempt to demonstrate in our thesis, however, is that, in conrad's three novels in

question, such an argument is taken to be far from being true and indisputable- Our

purpose is to demonstrate that the real reason behind colonization in Heart of Darkness,

Lord Jim and Vicmry, besides economic exploitation of course, is shown to lie deepl y in

the colonizer's psyche itself. Moreover, the point we hope to illustrate is that the whole

colonial discourse is inextricably engrained in the colonizer's desire to do away with his

own feus vis-à-vis the colonized. In other words, Our purpose is to show that the

colonizer's perception and image of the Other is oniy a perception and an image created

out of a subjective and exaggerated sense of trepidation and distrust towards otherness.

CIaiming that colonialism is primarily and intrinsicaily a psychological

phenomenon by no means ignores or discounts its political and economic dimensions.

Our intention to highlight the psychological dynamics of colonidism emanates 60m the

conviction that its negative repercussions, whether on the psyche of the colonizer or on

that of the cdonized, are more profound and more persistent than any political or

economic exploitation. Once again, we would like to recdl that what predates physical

colonization, that is, the occupation of one country by another, is its theoretical

preconceptions, but, and more important1 y, what ou tdates it, is its metaphysical

backlash. This is because we believe that psychological injuries due to ideas about the

state of being of others are more durable, and less curable, than economic injuries. In a

colonial context, political manipulation and economic exploitation can be seen as only

hvo realities that intensify and aggravate a much deeper and a more tragic redity,

namely, the distorted and impaired psychology of the colonized peoples and the

colonizer as well. In truth, to understand Conrad's three novels, what we intend to

scrutinize in the rest of this chapter is not the psychological repercussion of colonialisrn,

but rather the psychological generation of the colonial impulse in the colonizer's mind.

Here again, we should dwell on Said's statement that "the European culture

gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of

surrogate and even underground self' (3). The importance of such a statement lies in

what it reveals in the West-East or coIonizer-colonized relationship. In fact, what this

statement informs u s about is that the colonizer's perception of the Other is no more than

a reflection of his own fear and mistrust so far as that Other is concemed. As such, the

Other is transformed not only into a recipient of but also into a mirror that reflects the

colonizer's sense of uepidation and apprehension. Far more significant is that the

colonizer refuses to look into that mirror and keeps accurnulating d l that is negative in

his personality and identity in order to invest it upon the Other. This, of course, should

not apply to the colonizer o r tn the West in any intended or any particular fashion. For

this kind of "mental operation", as Said calls it, and here we may disagree with him, is

true to all humankind. Lest one be accused of moral dogmatism, one should accept the

fact that we, as human beings, most often tend not to recognize or to admit what is

flawed and degenerate in our nature or in Our personality. We usually tend to present

ourseives in the best of images we can. It is also tnie that we sometimes tend to project

what is negative in us ont0 an unfamiliar or distant object. En a colonial context, this

unfamiliar arid distant object happens to be the colonized. OnIy afier recognizing this

tmth are we allowed to claim that the colonized features in the Western mind "as a

surrogate and even underground self". Only then can we assert that the struggle between

the colonizer and the colonized is a stmggle between the colonizer and his other self.

Hence, the binarism of good and bad, of civilized and savage, is metamorphosed in the

colonizer's psyche into a binarism of recognized self and rejected self, into a self and a

"not self'.

So far we have concentrated on the perceptian of the Other as an object of fear

and apprehension. Yet, this is not al l that needs to be said. The colonid discourse is so

complex and so multi-layered that it allows for a great number of interpretations

conceming its representation of the Other or of the native. One of these interpretations

is that the indigene is often an object of fear and at the same time an object of desire. Ln

the case of the relations between the West and the Ea3t, the former has most of the time

been drawn to and fascinated by the latter. This, as a matter of fact, does not contradict

what we have already said about the West's fear of the unknown East. But what we

wish to argue is that the West has always perceived the East in mixed and contradictory

terms. Sornetimes the East is perceived as a dangerous and insecure space to be

shumed. At other times, it is perceived as an exotic and enchanting space to be

discovered. In this very context, Said argues that "the Orient at large ... vacillates

between the West's contempt for what is farniliar and its shivers of delight in - or fear of

- novelty" (59). This suggests that the Orient, or the Other, cornes to feature in the

European mind as an object of both attraction and repulsion.

The dialectic of this attraction and repulsion is what characterizes the colonizer's

perception of the Other in particular and defines the nature of the colonial discourse in

general. It is along these paradoxical paradigms that the colonial discourse constructs its

stereotypes about otherness. In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha contends

that the most unchanging and most permanent peculiarity of the colonial discourse is its

constant dependence on certain fixed, yet paradoxical, stereotypes. "An important

feature of colonial discourse", he claims, "is its dependence on the concept of 'fixity' in

the ideologid construction of othemess. Fixity, as the sign of cultural, historicd and

racial differences in the discourse of coloniaiism, is a paradoxical mode of

representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order and disorder, degeneracy

and daemonic repetition" (66). The notion of 'fixity' that Bhabha utilizes does not

designate that the Other is constructed according to a single stereotype. On the contrary,

'fixity', in Bhabha's view, refers to the fact that the colonizer's perception of otherness

has ceaselessly depended on a plethora of ambivalent and contradictory stereotypes. As

a mode of representation, the colonial stereotype cornes to be characterized by an

inherent ambivalence, or let us Say a polyvalence, that ensures "its currency-.-its

repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures" (66).

Evidence of the incongruity in the West's perception of the Oiher is detectable

in Comd ' s African jungle Heart of Darhess, and be continued his portrayal of the

Westerner's mind in its incongrnous ambiguous encounter with the indigenes of an

unfarniliar terrestrial space in his Malay novel, Lord Jim. In Lord Jirn, this encounter

between West and East is most revelatory. It is quite peculiar that before Jim leaves for

Patusan, where he is supposed to start a new iife after the Patna scandal, Marlow

describes him insistently as carrying with him a revolver a d a box of cartridges. For

Marlow, Jirn's safety in such an unknown region as Patusan c m depend only on gunfïre,

and not on "a half-crown complete Shakespeare" (237). Marlow tells Jini that the

revolver "may help [him] remain" or, as he corrects himself, "may get [him] in" (237).

But Jim leaves for Patusan with only an empty revolver. Marlow here presupposes that

Jirn's entrance into Patusan might require the exertion of some violence on its

inhabitants. Trivial as this detail might seem, it helps us understand the white

European's misapprehension of the Other. In fact, Marlow's fear for Jirn stems fiom his

fear of the f atusan natives. Thus, some means of precaution, which does not prevent a

subsequent violence, is, to Marlow, a judicious measure to secure Jirn's safe intrusion

into the land of the natives.

Later in the narrative, however, when Marlow approaches these natives, we

realize that bis fears of them do not exclude a certain fascination with thern too- This is

manifested in what he says about the relationship between Jirn and Dain Wans in the

second part of the novel. Dain Wans is the son of Doramin, the leader of the immigrant

Bugis, whom Jim helps against the tyranny of the Rajah Tunku Allang, the Malaysian

despot in Patusan. Despite the cultural and racial differences that exist between Jirn and

Dain Waris, Marlow is astounded at the profound sense of human fellowship that grows

between them. His fascination is stronger when Dain Warïs exhibits what Marlow used

to consider as typically European quôlities:

Dain Waris, the disthguished youth, was the first to believe in [Jirn]; theirs was one of those strange, profound, rare fnendships between brown and white, in which the very difference of race seems to draw two human beings closer by some mystic element of sympathy. Of Dain WaRs, his own people said with pride that he knew how to fi@ like a white man. This was tnie; he had that sort of courage-the courage in the open, 1 may say-but he had aIso a European mind. You meet them sometimes like that, and are surprised to discover unexpectedly a farniliar tum of thought, an unobscured vision, a tenacity of purpose, a touch of altnrism. (261-2)

The fnendship between Jirn and Dain Wans, as a matter of fact, stands as a metaphor for

the fascination of the Occident by the Orient. What fascinates Marlow, actually, is the

Oriental's ability to develop certain aptitudes and talents that are not so different from

those of an Occidental. That Dain Waris, the supposedly uncivilized Eastemer, can be

as courageous and as intelligent as any other European is what captivates Marlow. Of

Dain Waris Marlow says, cc 1 speak of him because he had captivated me" (262). The

youth's ability to understand and to sympathize with Jim alIows Marlow to re-assess his

own prejudices as a Westemer against the native Malaysians altogether: "Such beings

open to the Western eye . . .the hidden possibilities of races and lands over which hangs

the mystery of unrecorded agesn (262). Just as the black natives in Heart of Darkness

expose Marlow to the mystery of prehistoric times, the Malaysian natives here in Lord

Jim also reveal to him the mystery of unrecorded years. The mystery that these natives

reveal to Marlow is that only in a prehistoric and unrecorded moment in time or only in

an uncompted state of civilization cm human beings forge solid ties of friendship and

amity. The kind of friendship that grows between Jirn and Dain Waris in Lord JNn is

illustrative not only of the fascination that the European might experience vis-à-vis the

Orher but also of the possibility of crossing the racial, cultural and political boundaries

that are demarcated by colonial ideology.

In Victory, the third novel under study, as Conrad continues his scrutiny of the

Westerner's contradictory perception of the Other, there too it is the indigene and his

land on which he dwells- Early in the narrative, Heyst, the novel's protagonist, is

iatroduced to us as someone who is enthralled by the beauty of Iife in the Malaysian

islands. Although his vocation as a "manager in the tropics" (5) is not needed any more,

especially after the liquidation of the Tropical Belt Cod Company for which he works in

Samburan, Heyst cannot Ieave the island. The frame narrator tells us that he once met a

man "to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with anything in particular (. . .): '1 am

enchanted with these islands"' (6). Heyst's fascination with Iife in the Malaysian

ArchipeIago is emphasised ofien and again by the f i m e narrator:

He whom we used to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was suffering from thorough disenchantment. Not wifb the islands, however- The Archipelago has a lasting fascination. It is not easy to shake off the spe l of island Me. Heyst was disenchanted with Iife as a whole ... He was no longer enchanted, though he was still a captive of the islands. He had no intention to leave them ever. (65-6)

However, Heyst is fascinated not only by the islands but also by its inhabitants, with the

indigenes as well as by the place. Wang, the Chinaman who accompanies him to

Samburan, is therefore also an object of his interest. What breeds this fascination for

Wang in Heyst is his inscnitable behaviour. On the island, he appears and disappears in

a way that remains totally mysterious to Heyst. His presence is materialization and his

absence is "a process of evaporation" (188). He moves about on the island "without a

stir or sound" (189) and he vanishes not "out of sight" but "out of existence" altogether.

So mystifying and so puzzling Wang's actions are that even we, the readers, start

questioning his beionging to a world of real human beings.

It is quite striking how similar Conrad's depiction of this Chinarnan in Victory is

to that of the black woman in Heurt of Darkness. Both characters enter and exit the

action of Conrad's plots in a manner that dazzles the same character Marlow's

comprehension. While the black woman's physical presence suggests metaphysical

charm and power that define her existence, the Chinaman's movements suggest an

esoteric and obscure process of materialization and evaporation that descnbes him. That

Conrad invests in his non-European characters such enigmatic and unfathomable

attributes is not unintentional. In fact, the way in which he represents the Chinaman in

Victory reveals to us much of his real attitudes towards otherness. Like the black

woman in Heart of Darkness, the Chinaman în Victory is meant to occupy an

imaginative space onto which Conrad projects the European's fascination vis-à-vis the

non-European Other. If sometimes we wonder whether Wang is a real human being or

not, it is because his symbolic function in the novel is more significant to Conrad than

his actual participation in its plot.

Nonetheless, again as in Heart of Darkness, the inscrutability of the Chinaman's

behaviour provokes in Heyst, besides fascination, a certain sense of mistrust and

apprehension. When Heyst finds missing the revolver that Marlow gave hirn before his

departure for Samburan, he starts doubting the Chinaman. As sooner as he realizes that

his life might be exposed to a certain danger, Heyst carmot but cast his suspicions on

Wang his servant. That this Chinaman has always been a devoted servant and a constant

attendant to Heyst does not prevent the Iatter fiom regarding him as a source of menace

and imminent danger. Heyst's earlier fascination for Wang is now transfomed into fear

and apprehension. Heyst now sees Wang's mystenous appearances and disappearances

as the signs of hornicidal intentions. At the very moment that Heyst misses the revolver,

a symbolic device that guarantees his survival on the island, Mariow steps into his mind

and exposes to us his suspicions about Wang's murderous plans: "There was nothing to

prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materidising suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or

anywhere, at any moment, and toppling him over with a dead sure shot" (256). In truth,

Heyst's fear that the Chinarnan might constitute a possible threat to his life is a concrete

example of the West's distmst of the East. In fact, and in more general terrns, the

relationship between Heyst and Wang in this novel cm be viewed as a metaphoncal

illustration of the relationship between West and East. The West's stereotypical

perception of the East is being thematized here in the way Heyst perceives Wang. The

dialectic of attraction and repulsion, of fascination and trepidation, which characterizes

the colonial stereotype, is visibly epitomized in Heyst, the Western colonizer, and Wang,

the Eastern colonized.

If the colonial stereotype is govemed and defined by the dialectic of attraction

and repulsion, desire and derision, or pleasure and unpleasure, in order to explain the

dynamics of such dialectic, Bhabha adopts the Lacanian theory. More particularly

Bhabha believes in what Lacan says about the imaginary phase in the infant's maturation

into adulthood. Unlike Freud, who distinguishes between three phases in the child's

polymorphous development, namely, the anal, the oral, and the phallic, Lxan adopts

three other different phases through which the child goes before he acquires the status of

an adult. These three phases are the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. The first

phase is when the baby is no more than a blob that has neither sense of self nor sense of

identity. In this phase, there is no separation between baby and mother. The baby is

driven only by needs that have to be satisfied. This phase is called the real phase

because the original unity between mother and child is maintained in life after birth. In

the second stage, that is, the imaginary phase or the mirror stage, the chiid cornes to

identify with an image only of itself as it is reflected in a mirror, but not with its inner

and real self. This identification with the reflected image in the mirror takes place as the

child is being relatively separated from his mother and as it starts to experience a kind of

absence, incompleteness or lack due to that separation. In order to compensate for this

lack or this insufficiency, the child starts to see its reflected image in the mirror, while

still misperceiving it as an image outside and alien to itself, as a perfect and complete

image, or what is called in psychoanalysis an "ideal ego". This phase is called the

imaginary phase because in it the child starts for the first time to experience the

dichotomy of self or other, although the reflected image in the mirror is the image of the

child itself, not that of another. It is also called the imaginary phase because what we

wilI later designate as "1", that is, our inner self, is actually based on a mere image.

Finally, the symbolic phase occurs when the child has acquired a certain idea of its

"self' vis-à-vis its own "other" in the mirror. In this phase, the child has a h started to

define itself vis-à-vis the Other in the surrounding world and starts to express that in the

structure of language. This phase is called the symbolic phase because the child starts to

act as a speaking subject, using language as a system of signification and as an

instrument for expressing his Tdentity. In other words, in this phase the child

ultimately exits the world of natural ties and enters into the world of cultural ties.

To explain the paradoxical nature of the colonial stereotype, Bhabha focuses his

andysis on the imaginary phase or the mirror phase in Lacan's theory, To do so, he

relies on two scenes that occur in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks. According to

Bhabha, just as the infant in the imaginary phase moves from a denial of to identification

with its image in the mirror phase, so the white girl in the first scene "retums to her

mother in the recognition and disavowai of the Negroid type". In the second scene, "the

black child tums away from hirnself, his race, in his total identification with the

positivity of whiteness which is at once colour and no colour" (Bhabha 76). As in the

irnaginary phase, where the infant starts to see its reflected image in the mirror as an

ideal ego in order to compensate for the loss of that original unity of the real phase, here,

both the white girl and the black child look for an object of identification that represents

the idea of whoieness and completeness. In the context of the colonial stereotype, as a

matter of fact, the object of this narcissistic psychic operation is to be incarnated in the

White, as both colour and culture, In other words, the white race in colonial discourse

cornes to represent the ideal ego of the imaginary phase.

In the light of this tentative analysis of the colonial stereotype we could assume

that colonialism is far from being a mere relationship of oppressor to oppressed based on

the pretended assumption that the former is supenor to the latter. The way in which the

colonial stereotype is being constructed reveals to us as much information about the

colonizer himself as it does about the colonized. In truth, the stereotypical perception of

the indigene in colonial discourse, when it refers to the West's view and colonization of

what it cails the Other, is revealed to be more of a Western invention than a genuine

rendition of what the indigene really is, but in more recent studies, however, the colonial

stereotype of the native has also been treated as a psychological anomaly in the

colonizer's psyche. While we have seen that this mythologized image of the indigene

has its origins in a long historical contest between West and East, as Said has shown in

Orientalisrn, the often-postulated argument is that the colonial stereotype has developed

out of the colonizer's fear vis-à-vis the Other and his tendency to project it onto that

Other. Some crïtics, such as Bhabha, argue that this stereotype, as it is devetoped in

colonial discursive practices, displays a certain ambivalence in the way in which the

colonizer represents the colonized. The argument here is that the indigene figures in the

colonizer's mind either as an object of desire or an object of derision, or of both. The

explmation of this contradiction might be said to be found in child psychology. In fact,

it is beiieved that ~e dialectic of attraction and repuIsion inherent in the colonial

stereotype could be viewed in terms of the dialectic of recognition and disavowal

inherent in the imagïnary phase of the child's polyrnorphous growth. Whether the

colonial stereotype be a historicd phenornenon or a psychic one, what we should not

forget to ernphasize is its consequences on both colonizer and colonized when it cornes

to endorse colonial practices. The repercussions of the stereotypical perception and

representation of the indigene in Conrad's novels will constitute the subject matter of

Our next chapter. What we will try to show, as a matter of fact, is that the failure of the

imperial enterprise in the three novels under study is the resuit of the colonizer's limited

and biased conception of the indigenous race.

The Failure of the Imperfa1 Enterprise

We contended in the previous chapter that imperial practices are often justified

and consolidated by a whole colonial rhetoric. This rhetoric, it was shown, represents

and reflects a certain knowIedge that the colonizer has either acquired or invented about

the colonized. This kind of knowledge in tum serves the colonizer to mâke the

coionized less fearfui and more controllable, so much so that the latter, the colonized,

cornes to define hirnself only in terms of his dependence on and subordination to the

fomer. The editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths

and Helen Tiffin, argue that "the most formidable ally of the economic and political

control had Iong been the business of 'knowing' other peoples because this 'knowing'

underpinued imperïal dominance and became the mode by which they were increasingly

persuaded to know themselves: that is, as subordinate to Europe" (1). Our focal issue in

this chapter, however, is to show both how the indigene perceives himself under the

pressure of European domination to which the above quotation points and also how the

settler's limited perception of the indigene leads to the detenoration of both of them. In

the three Conradian novels we propose to study, the failure of irnperialism is explained

by its inability to take into senous consideration the cultural difference of the societies

of the indigenous peoples from it. As a result of this, as the colonial protagonist in each

novel deepens his ignorance of the indigene in the process of subjugating him, he is

faced with the failings and failure of his colonial effort. Kurtz, Lord Jim, and Heyst are

supposed to be the representatives of imperial Europe. But their anomalous perception

of and reaction to the colonial contexts in which they find themselves reveals to u s the

shortsightedness of the imperia1 vaIues they have been irnbued with and they lead them

to the destruction of the very thing they intend to create.

In The Mythology of hperialism (1971), Jonah Raskin extols Conrad as the first

early twentieth-century writer who depicts in bis fiction the defects and perversiveness

of irnperialism. If Kipling helped in the constmction of the irnperial edifice, Conrad

came to bIow it to bits, Conrad's art constitutes a revolution not only in the world of

fiction but also in the field of colonial criticism:

The world of irnperialism came crashing through the walls of nineteenth-century novel. Old conflicts were teminated, old boundaries were destroyed, oId characters were banished. A new universe of fiction was set down in their place. A revolution in the novel was effected. It was Joseph Conrad - the Pole, the outsider - who battered down the old walls- He set the dock on the time bomb of the twentieth-century revolution in the novel. His first blast leveled the old house of nineteenth-century fiction- His second ripped asunder the imperial house of modem fiction: Rudyard Kipling's monument to the empire. Kipling's wdls hide the truth of irnperialism. Conrad broke them down. He dragged the colonial world ont0 stage center of English fiction. (14)

Unlike Kipling, who, in Raskin7s view, is the pro-empire writer par excellence, Conrad

is the one writer who lays bare the truth of empire and its deeds. While Kipling invented

and "celebrated the white man's burden", "Conrad deflated it" (Raskin, 29). Conrad '5s

most representative of his time because he stands in sharpest opposition to it. He

reminds us that the great modem wrïter is a rebel and a craftsman, that he is both a

nihilist and a utopian- He destroys old worids and builds new ones from the nibble

about him" (Raskin, 36). What sets Conrad apart from the other writers of the first half

of the twentieth century, such as Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and

Joyce Cary, is his insistence on depicting the painful human condition within the context

of empire-building. Often in his fiction, Conrad pits both his European and indigene

characters in a colonial world and starts depicting their strenuous and dreadfd struggle

for self-realization and self-definition.

The struggle of Conrad's heroes gains greater significance when it involves their

own beliefs and convictions. As they reach out for these beliefs and convictions,

Conrad's heroes are cast in a geopolitical and cultural milieu that leads them to question

the tenability of their social and moral statlises. It is often argued that Conrad's heroes

are engaged in an interminable battle against the inexorable forces of fate. This is true.

For Conrad, a writer extremely influenced by the Nietzchean philosophy, believes that

the universe in which man lives is devoid of a moral authority that niay dictate and

consolidate different modes of mord conduct and social behaviour- However, and be

that as it may, one should not overlook the fact that the battle in which Conrad's heroes

engage is not dissociated from a certain historical context. When Conrad creates the

heroes of his fictions he aiways has in mind the historical circumstances in which they

will act and to which they will react. By historical circumstances we mean the political,

social, economic and intellectual tendencies that characterize Conrad's age and provide

the general framework for his fiction. Curiously enough, the three novels under

examination present us with protagonists that are the product of late nineteenth- and

early twentieth-century imperial Europe. They set out for different colonies in order to

pursue their dreams of success as mode1 colonid Europeans. But as soon as they enter

the foreign land of the colonized, their dreams are smashed to smithereens. Once in the

land of the colonized, they are faced with the real picture of their motherland. They

corne to see the hidden reality of imperialism and the violence of its practices. The

sweet "Dreams of Adventure", as Martin Green puts it, become bitter "Deeds of

Empire". Their interaction with the indigenous people of the colony provokes them to

ask a certain number of questions concerning their own cufture and their own identity.

As such, the quest for success turns into a quest for "self7. Their realization of what

they really are, that is, mere marionettes manipulated by the big hand of empire, Ieads to

auto-destruction and self-annihilation- This kind of self-destruction is actually their last

desperate move when any ultimate and viable self-identification becomes impossible.

Faced with their inability to identify with their own culture, because it has failed theni,

or with the culture of the natives, because it is alien to them, the protagonists of our three

novels resort to self-obliteration as a way out of this existential impasse.

Their failure to live up to their dreams of success designates the limitations of the

system of beliefs to which they belong. Their ultimate disintegration stands as a

powerful evidence for the failure of any imperial enterprise that does not allow for

cultural differences. In fact, Conrad's criticism of imperialism is focused more on its

effects than on its processes. Throughout the three novels, we shall see how Conrad lays

the emphasis more on the impact of imperialism on both colonizer and colonized than on

the different strategies and policies it adopts tu impose its hegemony. In his book,

Conrad 's Politicsi Communiiy and Anarchy in the Ficrion of Joseph Conrad (1 96?),

Avrom Fleishman argues that Conrad's anti-imperialism is most conspicuous when he

depicts in his novels the impact of imperialism on the colonized as well as on the

colonizer. Fleishrnan distinguishes between hvo sorts of effects that imperialism may

cause. On the side of the indigenous people, the effects are of a social order. On the

side of the settler, however, the effects of imperïalisrn are of a moral order. Here is

Fleishman's andysis of these two effects:

To see Conrad's tales of imperialism in the light of his social values, it is necessary to summarize his account of native societies and the impact of Europeans on them. He has little sympathy for the indigenous forms of social life: native rulers are predatory and rapacious (like the leaders of the "civilized" States, he also suggests), and tribal history is an almost unintempted record of war and enslaving or enslavement. The coming of the whites, however, only makes things worse: the primitive social order is reduced io anarchy. This is Conrad's aqswer to the daims of literary and other propagandists that England had assumed the "white man's burden".

As for the moral effects of colonial rule on the Europeans, their participation in imperialist ventures tends to decivilize, dehumanize, and destroy them because of their severance from the organic ties of their own social comrnunity. (82)

The importance of Fleishman's statement is that it confirms our argument that

imperialism has as many detrimental effects on the European as it has on the colonized

native. A colonial encounter between Europeans and natives involves a violence that

spares neither the former nor the latter. "Conrad's African tales", for instance,

Fleishman contends, "demonstrate that the contact of Europeans and natives encourages

the submerged barbansm of the supeficially civilized whites to express itself by

genocide. Not only are the natives stirred up by the rapacious policies of the

imperialists, but the whites become more savage than the 'savages'. The process known

colloquially as 'going native' - already observable in such previous Conrad heroes as

Aimayer, Willems, and Lingard - is fully realized in Kurtz" (90).

More interesthg in Fleishman's argument is that the degradation of the European

as well as that of the native is caused by their severance from their respective social

comrnunities. In a colonial milieu, the colonizer feels cut off and isolated fiom the

social structures of his mother country- In order to do away with that feeling of

remoteness and isolation, the colonizer tries to reproduce those structures in the colony

and to impose them on the natives. The natives, however, faced with this intrusion and

this disruption of their tribal social order, will respond with a kind of "retrogression to

atrocities and warfare" (Fleishman, 91). "Perhaps even a more profound disruption",

Fleishman explains, "is the process of uprooting hem [the natives] £rom their tribal

pattems of life and fitting them - awkwardly and ultimately unsuccessfully - into the

pattems of white society. This process has been studied by sociologists and

anthropologists under the name of 'detribalization', but long before them Conrad had

seized upon it as a major charge against imperialism" (91). The basic argument here is

that the absence or the breaking up of a regulating social order, such as the community,

compels the individual to respond with little except violence and wildness.

The n o m against which Conrad's account of detribalization was written is ultimately the concept of organic state. For Conrad shows that natives, as well as Europeans, are destroyed by the breakdown of their relationship with a stable order of society - by their loss of that sense of identity with a larger reality that gives the othenvise anarchic individual a mle of life. If we were to give a name to Kurtz's vision of "the horror", it might appropriately be anarchy: that state of social decomposition at the opposite pole from organic unity. This anarchy is already latent in the individual - individuality and anarchy are implicated in each other - and in the absence of an ordering community it springs into action as terrorisrn. (Fleishrnan, 92)

Hardly emphasizing Conrad's sympathies for the natives, however, Fleishman

argues that the failure of the imperial enterprise is only a failure to impose European

social structures on the indigenous peoples' mode of life. The obvious question to be

raised here is: could there be a form of impenalism that may really be profitable to both

outsider and native? As far as we know, in al1 the history of humankind no forrn of

colonization has ever been effected without causing injuries to both colonizer and

colonized. Bnitality, whatever shapes it might take, is inescapably inherent in imperial

practices. A writer with Conrad's background and insight could never fail to perceive

such an historical tnith- The ttrree novels chosen for this thesis show that Conrad has no

syrnpathy for any form, whatsoever and wherever, of irnperialism- Whether it is French,

Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, Arab, or English, irnperialism according to Conrad remains

an obnoxious enterprise that causes more injuries and suffenng than progress and

improvement. In one passage in Heart of Darkness, Marlow says that "dl Europe

contnbuted in the making of Kurtz" (83). The soie difference between one fom of

impenalism and another is probably in the degree of infliction.

Moreover, when it cornes to Conrad's representation of the natives in Heart o f

Darkness, for instance, Fleishrnan fails to perceive it as a crucial elernent in the writer's

anti-imperialist stance. To show how Conrad perceives the natives in this novel,

Fleishman quotes a passage in whïch Marlow is astounded by the restraint of the hunger-

driven cannibals from eating them:

What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear - or some kind of primitive honor? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can Wear it ouf disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition beliefs, and what you may cal1 principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze ... And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scniple. Restraint! 1 wouid just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a batdefield. But there was the fact facing me - the fact dazzling, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like the npple of an unfathomable enigma .... (96)

Fleishrnan's only comment on this is: "human nature rernains an enigma". Yes, this

rnay be true if we decide to Iook at Marlow's words outside the larger framework of his

narrative. But what if we try to counter the carinibal's restraint here with Kurtz's lack of

it. Later in the narrative, Marlow refers twice to Kurtz's insatiable hunger for ivory and

success- The first occasion is when he recounts the death of the helmsman: " Poor fool!

If he had only left that shutter alone, He had no restraint, no restraint - just like Kurtz"

(85, my emphasis). The second occasion is when he is taken aback by the sight of the

skulls planted on the stakes in front of Kurtz's house: "...there was nothing exactly

profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr Kurtz lacked restraint

in the gratification of his vicious lusts" (94-5). What we wish to argue here is that both

the restraint of the cannibals and Kurtz7s lack of it are not unjustified. They are meant to

show that the European c m be more savage than the so-called savages. They are also

rneant to highlight the humanity of those natives who cari act as human beings even in

the direst moments of physical affliction. About those cannibals Marlow says: ". . -1 saw

that sornething restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come

into play there ... Yes. 1 looked at them as you would on any human being, with a

cunosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of

an inexorable physical necessity'' (70-1). Interpreting this as a mere instance of the

enipa t ic nature of the human being, as Fleishrnan does, fails short in the attempt to

reveal Conrad's real anti-imperial attitudes.

A close scrutiny of Heart of Darkrzess allows us to detect more than one example

in which Conrad brings into focus the humanity of the native, on the one hand, and the

failure of irnperialism, on the other, on the grounds that the latter tends to ignore and

repress that hiimanity. But before we start bringing these examples to light we would

like to comment on how the novel opens and how important that opening is to Our

understanding of Conrad's anti-imperialist standpoint. It is quite curious that the first

utterance that Marlow makes in the novel referring to the Thames River is: "And this

also.:.has been one of the dark places of the earrh" (18). It is even more curious that

such an utterance cornes nght after the frarne narrator has introduced us to the important

role that the river Thames played in the histoncal process of empire-building:

And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, ' followed the sea' with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Tharnes. ... It had known and served ail the men of whom the nation is proud .... It had borne dl the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time.. . It had known the ships and the men .... Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they al1 had gone out on that strearn, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. (17)

Certainly it is not gratuitously that Conrad rnakes his storyteller, Marlow, start his yarn

by observing that the Thames, the river that has been the witness of and the participator

in the great work of empire building, is now a place of darkness. By juxtaposing two

contrasting images of the river - one as glorifying, the other as de-valorizing, and one as

light, the other as darkness - Conrad leaves the reader to decide the moral validity of

imperidism on his own- However, when Marlow's yarn draws to an end, it is the frame

narrator who now evokes the image of the Thames as a place of darkness, as if

convinced by Marlow's first utterance. The fact that the novel starts and ends with such

an emphasis on the darkness of the Thames could not have been a matter of haphazard

narrative contrivance. The eariier coritrast of images of light and darkness in the

description of the Thames is rnetarnorphosed at the end of the novel into the single

image of darkness. The ending of the novel does not confirm that the river Tharnes "had

known and served al1 the men of whom the nation is proud" and from which the "bearers

of a spark from the sacred fire" (17) had sailed. Rather, the conclusion of Conrad's

work affirms that as a river the Thames "flowed sombre under an overcast sky" and that

it "seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness7'(124). In a word, the real heart

of darkness is to be located not in the Congo jungle but in England and its civilizing

rnission-

Most revealing of Conrad's moral views is his representation of the natives in

Heart of Darkness. The way Conrad conceives of the natives is part and parce1 of his

anti-impenalist views. In fact, Marlow's journey up the Congo River could be

considered as an exposition of the injuries that the colonial effort has inflicted upon that

land and its inhabitants. By exposing to us the impaired image and the distorted identity

of the indigene, Conrad implicitly questions the moral validity of imperialism and lays

bare its insufficiency as a civilizing instrument. Marlow's first awareness of the wanton

brutality of impenalism takes place when he goes aboard the French steamer. As the

latter approaches the coasts of the Congo River, the steamer starts f i ~ g recklessly into

the bushes of the jungle where the natives are supposed to be hiding and waiting for

attack. Marlow's comment on what he is witnessing reveals much of his ire and

indignation at such "proceedings": "In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water,

there she was, incornprehensible, firing into a continent.. ., There was a touch of insanity

in the proceeding, a sense of lugubriûüs dro!!ery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by

sornebody on board assunng me earnestly there was a camp of natives - he called them

enemies - hidden out of si@ somewhere" (30-1). Then, as soon as he enters the jungle,

Marlow witnesses the dismal leftovers of an unfinished imperial project: " 1 came upon a

boiler walIowing in the grass, then found a path leading up the Ml. It turned aside for

the boulders, and also for an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its

wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animai.

I came upon more pieces of decaying rnachinery, a stack of msty nails"(32).

From the ravaged world of inanimate objects, Conrad leads his unidentified

narrator, Marlow and his readers to the atrocious world of animate beings. These beings

are the natives who are put into the service of imperid forces in the most homble ways.

If Conrad is to be considered as an anti-impenalist writer, it is on account of the

splendidly detailed and breath-taking descriptions of the oppressed natives that we

encounter in Heurt of Darkness:

A slight clinking behind me made me tum my head. Six btack men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind wagged to and fro Iike tails. 1 could see every nb, the joints of their limbs were Iike knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and al1 were connected together with a chah whose bits swung between thern, rhythmically clinking. Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of orninous voice; but these could by no stretch of imagination be called enernies. They were caIled cnminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had corne to them, an insoluble mystery ffom over the sea. Al1 their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nos tds quivered, the eyes stared stonily up-hill. They passed within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages. (33)

In this passage Conrad manipulates the reader's attention by employing what Cedric

Watts, in his The Descriptive Tes: un I l z frodrcction to Covert Plots (1 984), has descri bed

as "delayed decoding" (43). According to this narrative technique, the reader is initially

given a coded message whose meaning is to be deciphered or decoded only later in the

narrative process. In the case of this passage, Conrad relates to us the event or the

message, which is here the clinking noise, without giving us a clue by which we would

understand the message, which is the source of that noise. Only later, after a physical

description of the natives, does Conrad provide us with the clue that will decode the

message that he means to convey to us in the passage. After a certain delay the reader

realizes that it is the chains around the natives' necks that cause the noise as they walk.

The importance of such a technique is not only to create a certain confusion in the

reader, which is part of the novel's thematic strategy, but also to have a greater effect on

the reader as he keeps actively struggling for a meaning and as he finally reaches it. If

Conrad chooses to engage his reader in such a fashion and in this particular context, that

is, in his description of this chain-gang scene, it i s to make him more aware of the

atrocious condition of the native under the yske of imperialism. Conrad's critique of

irnperial practices in the Congo colony is further confirmed when Marlow ends his

account of the chain-gang episode with a highly ironic tone. When recognized by

another amed white offïcer leading the neck-chained gang, because of his

distinguishable white skin, Marlow says, " [a] fter dl, 1 aiso was part of these high and

just proceedings" (33). This statement, in fact, could be counted only as one of the

biting ironies that Marlow launches against imperialism and that will frequently recur in

the novel.

Raskin's metaphorical description of Heart of Darkness as "a voyage into hell,

the hell of colonialism" is most relevant to Our argument. Marlow repeatedly refers to

his up-river joumey as a down-to-hell trip. His unremitting evocations of images of hell

and the devil are so conspicuous and so intense that one cannot but emphasize their

significance in the novel's thematic scheme. After the chah-gang scene, Marlow soon

takes us to the grove scene where he gives us another awful account of the death-iike

condition of the exploited native. Borrowing Dante's topographical conception of Hell,

Marlow describes the scene as a "gloomy circle of Inferno" (34). Like the author of

Comedia Divina, Conrad situates the heart of darkness in the same place as hell, in the

centre of the earth: "1 felt as though, instead of going to the centre of the continent, 1

were about to set off for the centre of the earth" (29). Moreover, and with reference to

Kurtz, images of the devil are most frequent in Marlow's narration: "The wildemess had

patted him ... it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed

his flesh, and sealed his sou1 to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some

devilish initiation" (81). Kurtz is also described as someone who "had taken a high seat

amongst the devils of the land" (81). The evocation of such images of hell, darkness,

and evil, are actually meant to show how evil the irnperial enterprise is or can be when it

is governed by sheer greed and based simply on material profit. Thus, Marlow's journey

in Heart of Darkness, just like Dante's and Virgil's in Inferno, is an allegorical journey

into the deep recesses of an infested mind and a compted system of beliefs. What

Marlow's joumey reveais to us are the decadence and the barbarity of European imperial

practices in the Congo colony, His narrative explores what is beneath the hollow

pretences of the "civiiizing mission7' and "the white man's burden7'- As Raskin writes,

"Heart of Darkness is an epiphany. IL takes u s behind the words 'civi1ization7 and

'empire'. Behind the door of civilization is European barbarity; behind the door of

empire is exploitation, death, disease, exile. &art of Darkness is a vision of evil" (153).

The evidence for thÏs evil lying behind a façade of barbarity is no better

illustrated than in instances where Conrad deals with the natives' suffenngs under the

yoke and abusive manoeuvres of imperialism. Marlow relates how, in the sarne

"gloomy circIe of Inferno", the natives are being slowly exterminated by the work of

empire:

'Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinghg to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in al1 the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soi1 under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

'They were dying slowly - it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not Miminals, they were nothing earthly now, - nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom, Brought frorn al1 the recesses of the Coast in d l the legaiity of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest- These moribund shapes were free as air - and nearly as thin. (35)

Any unbiased and unprejudiced reader cannot question the anti-irnperïalist thmst of such

a detailed description. Moreover, one should keep in mind that each time we have an

account of the natives' miserable condition in the novel we also have the cause of that

rnisery subtly annexed to it. In the chain-gang scene, for instance, after he has described

the pain of the natives, Conrad cleverly works in his criticism of impenalism as the main

cause of that pain. This criticism is concretized in the introduction of the character of

the white man who is escorting the chained natives: "Behind this raw matter one of the

reclairned, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carryùig a rifle

by its middle" (33).

In the case of the passage of the working chain gang scene quoted above, Conrad

aiso continues to make his reader reflect on what causes the natives to be in such a

dismal and dehumanized state. When Marlow offers a bit of the "good Swede's ship's

biscuits" to one of the natives, the Iatter takes it with a death-like indifference, "no other

movement and no other glance". But the native has "a bit of white worsted round his

neck. MarIow begins to ask a series of half-answered questions: " He had tied a bit of

white worsted round his neck - Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge - an

omament - a charm - a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at al1 comected with it? It

looked startling round his neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the sea" (35).

Introducing such questions right after the detailed description of the dying natives,

Conrad shrewdly engages the reader in the building of the novel's thematic structure and

in defining its moral outlook. That Conrad leaves these interrogations unanswered calls

for a vast range of interpretations- One possible reading of Conrad's interrogative

staternents is to suggest that "the idea" invoked by Marlow here connects with the same

"redeeming idea" to which he refers in the beginning of his narrative. The worsted

around the native's neck, which he has been offered or has obtained somewhere as a

compensation for his being exploited, is only a concrete ernbodiment of that idea which

is supposed to justify colonization. That Conrad opts for worsted instead of any other

object is certainly not accidental. In fact, the use of this "white thread from beyond the

seas" is rneant to remind us of the previous chain-gang sequence and, therefore, to re-

enforce our condemnation of impenal exploitation. By thus Iinking the natives'

degraded condition to the degrading practices of colonization in the Congo, Conrad

seems to repudiate any imperial enterprise that denies the humanity of the colonized and

cares only about material advantages.

Conrad's representation of the native in Neart of Darkness is a centrai issue that

has engendered diverging critical standpoints concerning his moral and political views.

Studying the image of the native in Heart of Darkness, one shouid not overlook what

Chinua Achebe, an important figure in post-colonial critical theory and a renowned

contemporary writer, has said about Conrad's depiction of Afn'ca and black Afrïcans. Zn

"An Image of Afnca", there appears Achebe's famous attack on Conrad as "a bloody

racist". His contention is that Conrad used &ca as a mere "setting and backdrop

which elirninates the Afiican as human factor. Anica as a rnetaphysical battlefield

devoid of dl recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his

peril". For Achebe, "reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty

European rnind" bears t e s b o n y to the West's c'preposterous and perverse.. .arrogance"

(Hanmer, 124). Not that Achebe's views about how the West perceives the Other are

groundless or unsupported. But when they corne to be applied to Conrad's art of fiction

and to question the writer's moral visions, they fa11 short and seem to be iinjustified.

This is not to depreciate Achebe's literary talent, nor to under-estimate his signifiicance

as an expert in post-colonial criticism. But what must be ernphasized is his limited

perception of Conrad's moral integrity as far as his representation of the African native

is concerned. For Achebe, Heart of Darhess loses al1 claims to artistic excellence and

merit on account of its author's unfavourable depiction of the African native- According

to Achebe, Conrad's novel is stripping the black African of his humanity and, thus,

confirming a long European tradition of representing othemess.

What Achebe, in Our opinion, fails or refuses to do is to put the novel into the

historical context in which it was written. One's reading of any work of art, no matter

how personal or autobiographical that work might be, is somehow imperfect and

deficient if it tends to ignore the circumstances that occasioned its production. It is true

that the artist most of the time creates out of his own impulses and his own mind's eye.

But one should not forget that his creative act and his genius consist mainly in

associating and transfonning certain materials that dready exist in the sunounding

world into a work of coherent aesthetic value. When Conrad decided to wnte Heart of

Darkness, he did not begin writing out of the blue. One look at his Congo Diary is

enough for its reader to acknowledge the historical authenticity of the novel. What

Conrad actually did was to apply his talent as an artist, to use Achebe's words, in order

to give an aesthetic form to the material that he gathered in his diary. In the "Author's

Note" to Heart of Darkness, Conrad explains how the novel that follows is more than a

mere historical record of certain personal experiences:

One more rernark may be added. 'Youth' is a feat of memory. It is a record of expenence; but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself. 'Heart of Darkness' is expenence, too; but it is experience pushed a Iittle (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate. 1 believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, 1 hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been stmck. (II)

The significance of the artist's work becomes greater than recording experience rnainly

when it addresses itself to the problems and issues that prompted its production.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness is, therefore, a novel that, while it attempts to address the

historical conditions that tnggered its birth in a highly aesthetic fashion, also records

Heart of Darkness was written during the heyday of European impenal

expansion. It deals in particular with the Belgian colonization of the Congo. In it,

Conrad reports and describes the miseries of the Congolese under the domination of

King Leopold II's regime and his voracious expansionist policies. Thus, the image of

Afnca that Conrad presents and that Achebe rejects is after al1 an image of a colonized,

irnpaired, and dehumanized Afnca. It is the image of a people that has been put to the

service of a dehumanizing system of oppression and exploitation. What Achebe seems

to be unaware of is Conrad's attempt to show that colonization and colonial practices are

the main causes of such a degenerate and dissipated Afnca. One of Conrad's purposes

in this novel is to present us with an image of Afnca during colonization and with what

that colonization may cause in the native as well as in the settler. It is because of

colonization and its violence that the native has gone wild as it were, somehow more

savage than savage, and the settler has gone native. If Afnca appears to be used simply

as "a setting and backdrop" in which "one petty European mind" deteriorates, as Achebe

contends, it is because what is brought to the foreground has a greater significance to

Conrad. If Africa is reduced to "the roie of props" on the stage of the novel's action, it

is because the imperid forces want it to be no more than a mere geographical space to be

exhausted of its natural resources. Moreover, when Conrad depicts the black Aficans as

inhuman beings, he does not rnean that they are inhuman either by the laws of divinity or

the laws of nature, but that they are human beings who have been robbed of their

hurnanity.

In Heurt of Durkness, Conrad is very carefuI to make his reader realize that the

bIack African is not less human than the white colonial officeholder. For example, in

one of his reflective scenes, trying to understand the cannibals' sense of restraint,

Marlow opines that this restraint is a manifestation of one of the rnysteries in al1 of

human nature: "Why in the name of al1 the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for

us. -. 1 saw that something restraining, one of those hurnan secrets that baffle probability,

had corne into play" (70). This, of course, is to be contrasted with Kurtz's Iack of

restraint and al1 the images of evil and inhumanity that Conrad attributes to him- One of

the many passages for which Achebe castigates Conrad in Heart of Darkness is the one

in which Conrad, in our opinion, is most critical of imperialism and most favourable to

the natives' hurnanity,

'The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing rnonstrous and free. It was unearthIy, and the men were - No, they were not inhuman. WeI1, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would corne slowly to one. They howled, and Ieaped, and spun, and made homd faces; but what thdled you was just the thought of their humanity - Iike yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wiId and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the temble frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you - you so remote from the night of first ages - could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything - because anything is in it, al1 the past as well as al1 the future. (63)

A possible reading of such a passage suggests that the ugliness to which Conrad refers is

the ugliness of the settler7s image that he projects on the Other. Recalling what Said

says about the Orient as the West's "surrogate and even underground self', we may take

this passage as an illustration of how the European mind comes to construct the

unfamiljar and remote Other. Conrad's allusion to the " remote kinship" brings to mind

that affinity between the Westerner and his other inferior self: Y . .what thrilled you was

just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with

this wiId and passionate uproar", What is most noteworthy here is that Conrad is in no

account confiming the superiority of the European and the infenority of the black

African, as Achebe would believe. Rather the above passage is one of many wherein

Conrad tries to &ring to light the humanity of the native Afn'can and to awaken his

European audience to the reaiity of such humanity. When Marlow says "that the worst

of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman", he actually reminds his compatriots of

how terrible the crime would be if such humanity is denied and destroyed. We contend

that the ugliness here is not the ugliness of the native Afncan. Nor is it the ugliness of

the European's self-image- It is rather the ugliness of the crime when committed against

the humanity of any living person.

Above all, Heart of Darkness is a novel that attempts to subvert the European's

conception of the Other rather than to confirm it. "One response to Achebe's criticisrn",

Hampson argues, "would be that Heart of Darkness engages with the European

representations of Africa rather than with AfricaY'(Finchman and Hooper71). Ln a sense,

by putting much emphasis on the human attributes of the natives and by subtiy

associating their sufferings with the forces of empire, Conrad tries to shake the oid

imperid stereotypes about the colonized indigene. The maintenance of the colonial

stereotypes, which presume the superiorïty of the colonizer over the colonized, is shown

by Conrad to be the main reason for the failure of the imperid enterprise. Marlow's lie

to the "Intended", Kurtz's fiancé back in London, at the end of the novel, functions as a

symbolic affirmation that imperialism can thrive in lies and dissimulation. In

Hampson's view, Marlow's Iie, "far from unequivocally reasserting the impenal

mission," "reinstates the discourse of imperialism but reinstates it as a lie. Marlow

protects the faith of the Intended in that world of ilhsions, which she and Marlow's aunt

inhabit" (Finchman and Hooper, 71). As such, Hearr of Darkness reveals the discourse

of imperialism to be a discourse based on falsified perceptions and representations-

Another limitation to Achebe's accusation that Conrad denigrates Africa

concerns the novel's treatment of the white European in the Congo coIony. Achebe,

strangely enough, seems to have Iimited his study of the novel to Conrad's

representation of the natives, paying no special attention to his approach to white

characters. Although it is true that we sometlmes have the impression that Conrad is

incapable of understanding or rendering adequateIy and faithfully the real nature of the

indigene, this may be explained by the fact that the indigene and his culture are both

remote and quite inaccessibIe to the newcomer. Marlow says, "We were cut off from

the comprehension of our sunoundings. .. - We could not understand because we were

too far and could not remember ..." (62)- But what is remarkably curious about

Conrad's Heart of Darkness is that it treats white European settlers in the Congo colony

with a contempt and derision that cannot escape the attention of the vigilant reader.

Conrad's representation of the natives may be disputable and understandable, but his

representation and treatment of the white intmder leaves no doubt that he is not a pro-

empire writer or, at least, that he does not approve of certain imperial practices.

Taking issue with Achebe's ruthless criticism, Mitzi Anderson claims that the

Nigerian cntic's mistake consists in his disregarding the fact that Conrad applies animal

imagery in the description of not only black natives but also white intruders. According

to Anderson, "[n] ot only does Achebe ignore the irony that underscores an obvious

regret at the effect of civilization on the natives but he overlooks the fact that animal

imagery in the rest of the novella is reserved for the European intruders''. As an

example, Anderson refers to the manager's "short flipper of an am" that "suggests an

amphibian nature befitting an acquaintance with primordial slirne" (Finchman and

Hooper, 155). EIsewhere in the noveI, the white colonial agents of the Eldorado

Expedition are considered at one point as "Iess valuable animds" than the donkeys they

use in their colonial mission: "Long afterwards the news came that al1 the donkeys were

dead. 1 know nothing as to the fate of the less valuable anirnâls. They, no doubt, like

the rest of us, found what they deserved" (59). Moreover, after the natives' attack on the

steamer, Marlow describes the awe-stricken pilgrims and their manager as rnagpies

making strident and raucous sounds: "Al1 the pilgrims and the manager were then

congregated on the awning-deck about the pilot-house, chattering at each other like a

flock of excited magpies" (85). Magpies, known for their thievery and loud chatter, are

perfectly suitable to underline ttie pillage effected by the white officials in the colony

and to establish a contrast with the noise and disturbance they brought with them to the

stillness of the nature that they have corne to invade.

To these anima1 descriptions of white men in the novel, there is added their

description as devils. Among these Kurtz is the most prominent. Kurtz, the most

important white figure in Heurt of Darkness and the object of Marlow's quest, is

frequently descnbed in contemptuous arid awesome terms more so than the rest of the

white characters, associating him with the devil. The chief of the h n e r Station is

Kurtz's official titie, but he has yet another order far more than yet animalistic. He is of

the devil order, "an animated image of death carved out of old ivoryo', with a mouth that

opens and gives "him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow

al1 the air, al1 the earth, al1 the men before him" (97): "He could be very temble", his

Russian worshiper says, "You can't judge Mr Kurtz as you would an ordinary man"

(92). Natives and their tribal chiefs would bend down upon their knees in his presence

and pay him tribute: "His ascendancy was extraordinary. The camps of these people

[the natives] surrounded the place [Kurtz 's house], and the chiefs would crawl.. ." (95).

Kurtz tums into a spirit, a ghost, a Mephistopheles of the wildemess to be invoked and

conjured up: "1 had to deal with a being to whom a 1 could not appeai in the name of

anything high or low. 1 had, even like the niggers, to invoke him - himself - his own

exal ted and incredible degradation" (107).

That Kurtz is portrayed as a devil-like figure is not purposeless. His

transcendence into such an order provokes in the reader such mixed feelings as terror,

pity and fascination. Like a Greek tragic hero, KUN cornes to arouse terror and

trepidation. His deeds confound and exceed any human comprehension and conception.

One shudders at the idea of being a "Kurtz". Kurtz also stirs in us a sense of pity, for

despite his evil, the reader still somehow feels that he has not deliberately chosen to be

evil and that he ultimately becomes aware of the nature of his predicarnent. Much more

interesting to Our argument in this thesis is that each of these effects, which Conrad's

characterization of Kurtz produces in the reader, is strongly connected to the character's

status as the empire's representative and voice. If we do feel any sympathy or

fascination for Kurtz, it is owing to his deep consciousness of his tragic catastrophe. His

transformation and his deterioration designate more than the mere "breakup of one petty

European mind", as Achebe chinas. In fact, the disintegration of Kurtz's mind and his

metamorphoses into an inhuman, or let us Say a suprahuman, being are the signs of a

failed and failing imperial enterprise. In a word, it is Kurtz's knowledge that he is

reduced to no more than a toy in the foolish hand of empire that arouses Our pity and

admiration altogether. The extremism of his rebellion gives hirn a heroic status,

especially when that rebellion is carried out against his own community and his own

culture. Having witnessed the deeds of empire, Kurtz, instead of stopping them, pushes

them to the extrerne and becomes a pagan god in the jungle. Kurtz's revolt is a revolt

that passes a moral judgment on imperial Europe and at the same time refuses any

compromises. Faced with the inhumanity of imperialism, Kurtz decides to condemn it

by exposing it in its ugliest forms. Enmeshed in the compted and corrupting web of

imperial manoeuvres, Kurtz is incapable of saving himself- There is only death waiting

for him. But his death must not be insignificant. It must serve as a judgement on those

who caused it (Raskin, 160). Kurtz has looked deep into his existence and found out its

insignificance and its nothingness in the big game of empire building. This provokes the

rebellion and madness of his souk "But his sou1 was mad. Being aIone in the wilderness,

it had looked within itself, and by heavens! 1 tell you, it had gone mad ... He struggled

with himself, too. 1 saw it, - 1 heard it. 1 saw the inconceivable mystery of a sou1 that

knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself' (107-8).

Ultirnately, the failure of the imperial enterprise in Heart of Darkness is

thematized in Kurtz's conversion to tribalism. Holding the position of a tribal leader,

Kurtz renounces al1 f o m s of European civilization, including the social and moral

structures of his own community, and embraces instead what might be qualified as a

primeval mode of human organization. This notion of going back to the early primitive

ages has already been invoked by Marlow: "Going up that river was like travelling back

to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation noted on the earth and the big

trees were kings" (59). The obvious question is: why does Conrad make Kurtz undergo

such a change in his fortune? How convincing is his reversion from "an emissary of pity,

and science, and progress" (47) to a foster child of the wilderness and a highly ranked

and fearful devil "amongst the devils of the Iand" (81)? Had he considered such

questions, Achebe, we think, w o d d not have treated Conrad as he did. Our contention,

as a matter of fact, is that Conrad's most probable intention is to warn the white

European against any behaviour that denies the humanity of those who are racially or

culturally different- Kurtz's deterioration and dementedness are presented as the

inevitable fate of any one who rnakes profit at the expense of those whom he deems

inferior. Heart of Darhess, to put it in one word, is a caveat sent out to impenal Europe

to stop its irresponsible proceedings in Africa.

Chapter V

The Subversion of the Imaae

In Chapter III, we dealt with the West's stereotyped image of the Other and in

Chapter IV with how the fvlure of this image was accompanied by the collapse of the

imperid enterprise. In this chapter, we wish to consider how Conrad depicts the failure

of this image of the Other that is created by the colonizer and how the indigene begins

finally to view himself positively. In Heart of Darkness, we find ample evidence of

Conrad's resistance to see the black native through typically European lenses. At first

glance, Heczrt of Darkness seems to offer an image of Auica that does not differ very

much from that generally held by imperial Europe. Our purpose here is to demonstrate

that this novel, however, is written not only to awaken colonial Europe to the atrocities

of its proceedings in Africa, but also to restore the impaired image of the black African.

The ambiguity and the doubt that frequently anse out of Conrad's representation of the

native are often explained by the exploration of his hybrid identity by critics and the

unclear results that this exploration provokes.

It is sometimes believed that Conrad's Anglo-Polish identity bestowed upon him

the possibility of seeing the world in terms different from the rest of his English or

Polish compatriots. Conrad is a wrïter who has absorbed the culture of the colonizer as

well as that of the colonized. His commitment to his rnother country, Poland, which

suffered so much from European hegemony, especially from Russia, is beyond any

question. But Conrad's commitment to England, the country that adopted him, nurtured

his manners and raised hirn to gentlernanliness, is also an irrefütable fact, Nevertheless,

Conrad could not remain uncriticd in imperial matters even of the people, the British,

who had long accepted him as one of theirs. According to Anthony Fothergill, "Conrad

stood both inside and outside Victorian culture" (Finchman and Hooper, 93). Such a

marginal position, Fothergill argues, endowed Conrad with the "capacity to see the

culturally familiar with an estranged eye. Thus he did not simply absorb and

unproblemâtically reiterate the ideologïcal predispositions of his time. He re-presented

their f o m s of representation to 'make us see7 their hidden terrns" (93). In other words,

we could Say that Conrad's fiction speaks for the oppressed from the position of the

oppressor, as one who has hirnself suffered from that oppression, Frorn the heart of the

empire, Conrad wrote a fiction that defended those whom the empire itself subjected,

From the centre, Conrad wrote about and for the periphery.

According to some critics such as Fothergill, however, Heart ofDarkness, whiIe

following the typical European pattern of representing the Other, at the same time

attempts to undennine that very representation- "Heart of Darkness", Fothergill

explains, "provides us with a representation which demonstrates bath the culmination of

a profoundiy entrenched Iiterary/political way of seeing the non-European Other and a

radical critique of it". For Fothergill, "Conrad shared the practices of thought whose

roots are buned in much earlier forms of European exploration and colonialism". Yet,

"[tlhe power of his writing lies in the contradictions existing between this complicity

and his critique of these practices" (Finchman and Hooper, 94). This, according to

Fothergill, means that Conrad's Heart of Darkness vacillates between a cornmitment to

the European7s perception of the black African and a tendency to ovemde it. However,

and despite al1 the indeteminacies and the vagueness that are supposed to characterize

Conrad's representation of the black African, the argument of this thesis remains that the

essential greatness of Heart of Darhess lies in its being one of the rarest fictional works

of the time that set out to challenge a long European tradition of perceiving and

constructing the non-European Other. Fothergill criticizes Heart of Darkness as a novel

that remains unclear in its representation of the African native and he argues that it is

Marlow's temporal and spatial position vis-à-vis the natives in the novel which decides

on whether his depiction of them is favourable or not (Finchman and Hooper, 102). But

what is disturbing in Fothergill's argument is the idea that Conrad's faithfulness and

genuineness in the description of the natives depend on his proxirnity to or his distance

from them. Our immediate response to this is that Marlow's description of the natives is

not so much connected to his reai-life temporal and spatial position among them as it is

connected to the literary objects of his narrative representation in general- To argue that

Marlow is faithfil to the real historical image of the natives as valid human beings and

that he dernolishes European stereotypes of them in real life would dismiss an essential

element of his thematic narrative strategy. Our point is that Marlow's distance from the

black African, which Fothergill misinterprets as an explmation for Conrad's

endorsement of the European stereotype, also means his proximity to the white

European. In other words, if Marlow seems to be distant fiom the natives and, therefore,

seems to confirm the European image of them, it is because he is too close to the

European hirnself. On no account does this mean that Marlow sides with the European

in his misrepresentation of the Afncan, as Fothergill would hold. On the contrary, this

means that Marlow, after descnbing the deteriorated condition of the native, moves to

the one who is the principal originator and author of that deterioration, namely, the

European and his colonial practices. Thus, Marlow's distance from the natives cornes to

signify not an endorsement of the colonial stereotype but rather a close scnitiny and

criticism of the white colonizer's behaviour. Conrad is not so careless as to present us

with the injury of the native without immediately hinting at or even charging the one

who afflicts him. Ahhough it is true that Hearr of Darkness represents the native

according to a long historical and cultural European tradition, the greatest ment of the

novel is that it does so in order <O decompose and obliterate that tradition and create a

new mode of looking at what is racially and cuIturalIy different. In our view, if Conrad

represents the Afncan in such light as to seem to some critics as unfavourable and

biased, it is because he wants to show the limitations of that representation. Thus, we

could Say that Heart of Darkness is a novel that spells out the offence and indicts the

offender, that pinpoints the attacks on justice and accuses the perpetrator, and that

reveals the crime and judges the criminal.

To encapsuiate Our argument concerning the anti-irnperialist thrust of Conrad's

Heart of Darkness, we find no better way than to invoke such instances from the novel

as those in which the reader has Iittle room to doubt the author7s integrity and

cornmitment to that undienable and indissoluble bond between al l human beings,

regardless of their racial or cultural differences. On special occasions, Conrad's

depiction of the bIack African in Heart of Darkness reveais to us his unfaitering

conviction that they are endowed with humanity that is as worthy and valuable as that of

the white European. The most noteworthy example of this is when Conrad makes his

narrator, Marlow, confess to his Iisteners the bond that was created between him and his

helmsman, and his grief at the death of the latter:

1 missed my Iate helmsman awfuily, - I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara- Well, don't you see, he had done sometfiing, he had sreered; for months 1 had him at my back - a help - an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me - 1 had to look after him, 1 worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtIe bond had been created, of which 1 only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my rnemory - like a daim of distant kinship affimed in a supreme moment. (84-5)

1s not the "distant kinship" here the same as the "remote kinship" which Marlow has

already used with reference to the other natives? 1s not this a confirmation enough that

the black African is capable of displaying his humanity whenever it is required? Raskin

confimis that Marlow7s discovery of the African's humanity '5s shattering. It means

that the exploitation of Afncans by Europeans is a crime. It deflates the whole morality

of imperialism" (157-8). Moreover, the significance of Conrad's words above is that it

marks the possibility of crossing the boundaries that have for so long set the world of the

white European apart from the world of the black African. The bond that Marlow cornes

to sense between him and his helmsman ascertains the fact that human relationships c m

transcend racial and cultural differences and be based on shared experiences and rnutuai

understanding. Even the cannibals seem to Mariow as "Fine Fellows": "We had enlisted

some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows - cannibals - in their place.

They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them" (61).

Marlow's comment on the cannlbals here, with al1 its irony, is of course by no

means of the same order as his comment earlier on the members of the Eldorado

Exploring Expedition with whom, too, he has worked. The cannibais' sense of restraint,

morality and honesty is set in sharp opposition to the white expedition pilgrims'

irresponsible, unscnipulous and amoral behaviour:

This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of senous intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise 1 dony t know . . . . (55)

Marlow's question at the end of this passage is evidently rhetorical. It is meant more as

an ironic comment than a genuine interrogation. The one who pays the pnce for "the

noble enterprise" is obviously not the white pilgrirns of greed but the native and,

sometimes, even more ironically the entrepreneur, that is, the colonizer himself as in the

case of Kurtz.

Despite the interpretative discrepancies that may emerge while dealing with

Heart of Darkness, therefore, we think the novel rernains exceptionally edifying in its

atternpt to set up a new way of looking at the black African in particular and the Other,

that is, the non-European in general. Conrad's crucial contribution to the betterment of

the human condition in this novel is that he encourages and insists on the possibility of a

productive dialogue between Europeans and non-Europeans. And the attainment of such

a dialogue is unquestionably contingent on accepted differences and recognized

limitations. As Paul Armstrong puts it, "[olne problem with critics who angrily artack

the text's racism and Eurocentrism is that they assume a position of epistemologicd

righteousness beyond the limitations of ethnic prejudice and cultural provincialism

which Conrad doubts anyone can occupy" (Finchman and Hooper, 23). The failure of

the imperid enterprise in Heart of Darkness, as we saw in the previous chapter, is

revealed to be the obvious result of a hnited perception of the Other and a denial of his

humanity.

In both Lord Jirn and Victory, Conrad d s o censures imperialism as a system of

thought and a form of action doomed to failure because of its ideological and ethicd

deficiencies. The action of Lord Jim takes pIace in the Far East where JM, the

protagonist, attempts to put into practice the romantic ideas that he has absorbed through

his earlier readings of European adventure books. His desire to accomplish heroic

imperid deeds is frustrated on two occasions. The first is when he deserts the

apparently sinking ship called the Pama with her eight hundred Arab pilgrirns going to

Mecca. The second is when he leaves for Patusan, another region in the Malay

Archipelago, in order to set up an ideal community with the natives as expiation for his

earlier betrayal. When the Patna, which against al1 expectations does not sink, Jim

stands facing the inevitable charge of having violated the code of seamanship.

Confronting alone such charges, Jim undergoes a certain existential crisis that calls into

question his own beIiefs and values- But Jirn is offered another chance to prove his

heroism and his sense of communal integrity. This time, he goes to Patusan where he

sides with the oppressed Bugis, led by Doramin, against the tyranny of the Malays,

headed by the Rajah Tunku Allang. But here again, as he has already failed to Save the

Arab pilgrirns of the Patna ship, Jim also fails to protect the Bugis against the malicious

conspiracies of the English desperado Gentleman Brown and the Malaysian despot

Tunku Allang.

The fact that Jim fails on both occasions compels the reader to raise a

considerable number of questions. If Jim has failed once, why does Conrad give him a

second chance? How well-founded is the charge against Jim in the first episode and how

convincing is his action in the second? And, finally, could Jirn be the ideal

representative of the white community in the Far East regions? Al1 these are questions

that Lord Jim provokes in the reader's mind and hardly provides answers for. The

humble attempt of this thesis at this point of Our argument, however, is to look for

possibilities of addressing such questions and ccming to an understanding of the whole

novel as an anti-imperialist work of fiction. Our primary and basic contention is that,

like its predecessors, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim is hndamentally concemed with the

failure of imperialism as a system of beliefs based on material profit and a denial of

human fellowship. Conrad's pivotal thinking in chese two novels is that irnperial values

- no matter how appealing and engaging they rnay appear at first sight - becorne

ineffective and even detrimental the moment they cease to be concerned with the racial

and cultural differences of other humans. The heroes of both novels become, willy-

nilly, not only the victimizers perpetrating the coIonial enterprise but also its own

victims. As Raskin writes, "[Cl onrad's heroes -..do battle with themselves. They are

betrayers and betrayed, victims and victimizers, totally isoiated and cornpletely

involved. They make history and are destroyed by it" (129-30).

The deterioration of the colonial protagonist in each of these two noveis stands

not as a personal disappointment, but rather as a failure of a whoie system of thought.

The disintegration of Kurtz's mind as well as the failure of Jim's attempts to create and

to live in an organic cornrnunity stand as signs of the ineffectiveness and the

inefficiencies of what they hold as beliefs and convictions. In Lord Jim, particularly,

however, the protagonist seems to be more oblivious to the pemicious nature of impenal

practices than Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. The fact that Jirn is offered a second chance

in Patusan and his second failure to live up to his ideals are meant to put into question

the validity of his political background more than to doubt his mord nghteousness. It is

essential to remind ourselves that Lord Jirn, as presented and depicted to us by Conrad's

narrator, Marlow, is a character endowed with an intnnsic goodness and honesty. He

also diHers from Kurtz in that he does not perceive clearly that he is simply a pawn

manipulated by overpowering irnpenal forces. Our syrnpathy for Kurtz results from his

bitter recognition of such a truth and his decision to lay bare its extravagance by pushing

it to the extreme. But Our sympathy for Jirn resuits from his inability to comprehend the

irnperial forces that determine his existence. He continues his blind struggle for self-

assertion until those very forces bnng his existence to an end. Whether Jirn's sacrificial

act is a way of self-realization or not is of little importance to Our argument. What we

wish to emphasize is that his death stands out as a striking example of how injurious the

colonial enterprise might be even to those who are supposed to be its champions.

In the Pama episode, Conrad cm be seen therefore as providing u s with

preliminary references to the novel's subsequent indictments of imperialism. Conrad's

descriptions of the Arab pilgrims in this episode bear testimony to his unprejudiced

stance vis-à-vis non-European peoples. One of Conrad's earlier accounts about these

pilgrims and the long and different hardships they went through in order to get aboard

the Patna and head toward Mecca, the destination of their worship, prepares the reader

for the atrociousness of the Europeans' act when they desert them and leave them to

their fate in the sea-

Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and mernories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes, from island to island, passing through suffenng, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. They came from solitary huts in the wildemess, from populous campongs, from villages by the sea. At the cal1 of an idea they had left their forests, their clearings, the protection of their mlers, their prospenty, their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the graves of their fathers. They came covered with dust, with seat, with grime, with rags - the strong men at the head of farnily parties, the Iean old men pressing forward without hope of retum; young boys with fearless eyes glancing curiously, shy little girls with tumbled long haïr; the timid women muffled up and clasping to their breasts, wrapped in loose ends of soiled head-cloths, their sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrirns of an exacting belief. (14- 15)

How different this "exacting belief", this "idea", is, to which these pilgrims are ready to

offer their lives as sacrifice, from the "idea" behind European colonialism! In Heart of

Darkness, the idea is used as something that redeems "the conquest of the earth" (20).

In Lord Jim, however, it is redemption itself. In the earlier novel, the idea justifies

violence. In the latter, ii is a message of amity and peace. How bitter Conrad's irony is

when the German skipper reduces al1 these pilgrims, with their "faith and hopes", with

their "affections and mernories" to a mere phrase, "look at dese cattle"! (15). Larer, the

chief officer of the escaping crew calls the pilgrims a "lot of brutes" (103). That the

pilgrims are making a "pious voyage", an "errand of faithY'(l5) is of no significance to

the European crew: "the five whites on board lived amidships, isolated from the human

cargo" (16). There is no human communication behveen the crew that cornmands the

ship and its live cargo. The pilgnms are considered as any other lifeless freight, a

material stock in a cruising ship- When the ship is thought to be in imminent danger, the

European officers, those responsible for the ship's safety, immediateiy take to their boats

and Save their own lives, with no qualms of conscience, with no twinge of guilt, for

leaving behind the eight hundred sleeping human beings on deck. After they have made

their escape, the deserters start talking, "to make noise over their escape", "as though

they had Ieft behind them nothing but an empty ship" (1 15).

The only member of the European crew who feels the pncking of conscience is

Jim. His sense of guilt becornes more intense and more painhl when he realizes that the

Patna is safely taken into tow. Jim's real agony, thus, becomes his awareness that he

could have rernained in the ship with the pilgrims and snatched one of the heroic

moments he has drearned of for so long. On board the Patna itself, the frarne narrator of

the novel tells us, Jirn is still dreaming of the occasion when his valour is required and

his heroism is tried:

"How steady she goes," thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these drearns and the success of his irnaginary achievements. They were the best parts of his life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before hirn with a heroic tread; they carried his sou1 away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face, (20)

But when the occasion does present itself in red life, Jim fails to take advantage of it

and prove his great courage and intrepidity, Instead, and not without hesitation, one

must admit, he jurnps and folIows the rest of the escaping crew. "The moment passes

him by", Raskin writes. "He does not snatch heroism out of the air" (163).

Despite Jim's breach of the code of the sea, in his narration Marlow tries hard not

to portray hirn to bis listeners as a downright traitor. On many occasions, Marlow

attempts to provide an explanation for Jim's betrayal, no rnatter how unrealistic and

unconvincing it might seem. On his way to the court where Jim is to be cross-examined,

Marlow ponders over the nature of Jim's crime and the retribution he will suffer: "The

real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of

mankind, and from that point of view he was no traitor, but his execution was a hole-

and-corner affair" (157). Why is JM "no rnean traitor" if he has broken "the faith with

the community of mankind" and if this is "the real significance of crime"? Why does

Marlow refuse to see Jirn in the light of a real perpetrator like the rest of the crew? Many

factors can explain this- First, like any other human being, Jirn has acted out of an

impulse that has been provoked by an abrupt state of emergency. It was not the want of

courage that made Jirn jump. Nor was it the fear of death. Rather, it was, Marlow

explains, the "extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yeaniing for rest"

(88) that compeiled Jim to do what he did. Not that Jim abandoned the ship because he

feared death, but he feared his witnesshg the panic and horror that death might provoke:

He was not afraid - oh no! only he just couldn't - that's alI. He was not afraid of death perhaps, but 1'11 tell you what, he was afraid of the emergency. His confounded imagination had evoked for him al1 the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped - d l the appdling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of. He rnight have been resigned to die but I suspect he wanted to die without added terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful trance. A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldorn that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life

In his collection of critical reviews of Conrad's fiction, Conrad: the Critical Heritage

(1973), Nonnan Sherry cites one of the reviews of Lord Jim, supposedly written by

Edward Garnett In his review, Garnett claims that "Lord Jirn is a searching sîudy - prosecuted with patience and understanding - of the cowardice of a man who is not a

coward" (115). Although Jim does not really achieve heroic action, the novel, as

Gamett claims, encourages the reader on no account to consider him a coward.

In the context of his weakness, Jim's redeeming character trait is his awareness

that he has done wrong, dthough the cause of his wrong act is somehow

incomprehensible to him. It is his devastating sense of guilt, which Marlow repeatedly

alludes to throughout the narrative, that rnakes of him a redeemable character. Right

after he has deserted the ship with the other offîcers, Jirn has an unintelligible impulse to

go back to where the ship is supposedly sinking. Accounting for Jim's act, Marlow

explains this impulse as symptomatic of the inherent virtue in Jim's character and his

deep sense of regret at what he has just comrnitted,

1 beIieve that, in the first moment, his heart was wrung with all the suffering, that his sou1 knew the accurnulated savour of al1 the fear, d l the horror, al1 the despair of eight hundred human beings pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death, else why should he have said, 'it seemed to me that 1 must jump out of that accursed boat and swim back to see - half a mile - more - any distance - to the very spot . . .? Why this impulse? Do you see the significance? Why back to the very spot? Why not drown alongside - if he meant drowning? why back to the very spot, to - as if his imagination had to be soothed by the assurance that al1 was over before death could b*g relief? I defy any one of you to offer another explanation.

It is because of the sudden manifestation of such emotional Impulses that Jirn is to be

viewed as "no mean traitor". The stings of compunction that wreak his conscience and

the image of the brown pilgrims that constantly haunts his mind are what set him apart

from the rest of the European crew.

Jim's character is aiso redeemable in the general action of LordJim in the sense

that he is not the only perpetrator to be blamed and to be judged. The desertion of the

ship, one should not forget, is a cornmon act of betrayal committed by five white

offïcers, including Jirn hirnself. That Jirn is being made to pay for an act that has been

committed collectively is an injustice that Marlow is constantly attempting to expose. If

Jim is a traitor, then al1 the members of the crew are also traitors and must be treated

accordingly. Marlow's unrernitting evocation of the phrase "one of us" in relation to

Jirn and to his predicament cm, in this context, be but an implicit indictment and

accusation that compromises al1 the crew members involved in the act of desertion.

Mariow's emphasis on Jim's being "one of us" therefore has a significance larger and

more profound than an indictment of five white officers who have irresponsibly

abandoned a ship that seemed to them in imminent danger of sinking. The phrase "one

of us" is, in fact, and by extension, beyond the single person of Jim, intended to involve

the entire white European cornmunity, its intervention in the Far East and the

consequences of that intervention. Jim's being "one of us" does not mean only his

belonging to the community of sea traders but also his belonging to a larger European

comrnunity that cornes to meddle with the lives of the Eastemers whether in tenns of

trade regulations or poiitical supervision- For that reason, Conrad's indictment of the

crew's conduct is essentially an indictment of the kind of commercial and political

behaviour that the white European community at large adopts in the regions of the Far

East.

Conrad's disapproval of such larger behaviour than the act of abandoning a ship

is further confirmed when he leads his protagonist, Lord Jim, to Patusan where the

dynamics and manoeuvres of the European presence are most promiaent, In this remote

island of Borneo, Jim tries to expiate his former misdemeanour. He tries to help the

immigrant Bugis from Celebes against the Malaysians. By bringing together both the

Bugis and the Dyaks, another faction involved in the conflict and Ied by the half-cast

Arab Shenf Ali, against the tyranny of Rajah Allang, Jirn begins to win the confidence

of the Bugis who have always mistrusted white intruders. Organizing the Bugis both

politically and socially, Jirn tries to create what he considers an ideal communîty based

on arnity and a work ethic. Nonetheless, the intervention of gentleman Brown and his

"band of hunted desperadoes", whose original purpose is to rob the island of its riches,

brings down al1 that Jirn has tned to build (Steward, 97). Duped by Brown's "cuming

appeal to him in the name of shared outlawry", Jirn decides to let go the English

scoundrel (Steward, 97). Gentleman Brown forms an alliance with Rajah Ailang and

takes revenge on Jirn and the Bugis and, in the process, kills Dain Waris, the son of

Doramin, the Bugis leader. As in the Patna affair, here again Jirn fails to protect the

native Easterners from the reckless and villainous behaviour of white intruders. But this

time, Jirn desperately offers his own life to Doramin in expiation for Dain Waris' death

and for the tribe's confidence that he has betrayed.

That Jirn fails twice to live up to his romantic ideals is not a gratuitous narrative

contrivance- His double failure actuaily requires the reader to consider Conrad's

intentions and motives most seriousiy. Originally, Conrad intended to reproduce in

fictional forrn the well-known affair of the Jeddah ship that, on 17 Juiy 1880,

transported on its deck more than nine hundred Muslim pilgrims from Singapore to

Mecca- The white offîcers in command of this ship abandoned it and its human cargo,

thinking that it would not stand the s t o m and that its peril was unavoidable. The

Jeddah, however, survived and was safely brought to harbour in Aden by another

steamer (Steward, 97). From there news accounts of this incident were propagated and

it became commonly known as the ''the Jeddah scandai". Conrad heard of this affair

and, when he went to Singapore three years later, the story of the Jeddah, as Stewards

writes, "must surely have been rekindled in his mind" (98). In order to expose the

dynamics of West-East relations, Conrad took up this histoncal incident and reproduced

it in fictional form. But Conrad also added to the original story another episode, the

Patusan. Despite the cnticism that Conrad received for the nove17s length and the

irnpossibility of its being narrated by Marlow and listened to uninterruptedly by his

audience in one night, the work in its totality is by no means incoherent or disjointed.

As Conrad hirnself puts it in "The Author's Note" to Lord Jim, "... the pilgrim ship

episode was a good starting-point for a free and wandering tale ... it was an event, too,

which could conceivabiy colour the whoIe 'sentiment of existence' in a simple and

sensitive character" (viii). Endeed, as the novei gains in length, it also gains in

significance. If in the Patna episode Conrad indicts European behaviour in the Far East

regions, in the Patusan episode, he further underscores such behaviour and its

repercussions on both Westerners and Eastemers.

It is extremely revealing of Conrad's anti-imperialist stance that Gentleman

Brown appears at the crucial moment when Lord Jirn begins to cherish the position of a

well-regarded and revered white leader arnong the Bugis. "He dominated the forest, the

secular gioom, the old mankind" (265)' MarIow tells us. In Patusan, Jim's achievements

are remarkable. They spread his fame and increase his power. At such a moment, when

Jim is about to assume the role of the antagonist to the irnperial white man in the distant

island, by being a benevolent irnperialist, gentleman Brown appears and aborts any

further attempt by him at fulfilling it. As Christopher GoGwilt puts it, "[b] efore he

executes his systematic destruction of Jim's political success [among the natives], the

man called Brown catches Jim in the embarrassing pose of pretending to 'the white

man's burden"' (99). But al1 "pretensions to imperial power" (GoGwilt, 99), even Jim's

in behalf of the natives, must corne to an end. GentIernan Brown, "the terror of this or

that group of islands in Polynesia" or this "latter-day buccaneer" (352), as Conrad caIls

hirn, is therefore introduced in the second part of the novel in order to bring about Jim's

disintegration as welI as to abort his plans for the Bugis community. Whereas in the

Patna episode, it is the behaviour of the white European officers that Conrad condemns,

in the Patusan episode, he develops and enlarges upon this condemnation by introducing

Gentleman Brown as the representative of those European sea traders whose conduct in

the East provokes anarchy and death. But it is curious that Jim's failure to be an

imperial hero in this episode, as in the previous one of the Patna, is also caused by the

reckless manoeuvres and behaviour of those to whom he culturaily belongs. In this

respect, Jim's second failure obtains its significance from the fact that it makes of him a

victim of his appurtenance to an irresponsible and acquisitive community. His

powerlessness before the sweeping manoeuvres of this community of Western intruders

Ieads not only to his own disintegration but aiso to the disintegration of the native

Easterners whom h e tries to help. Because of this, it becornes clear that the Patusan

episode occurs in Lord Jim in order to confimi the novel's criticism of Europe's imperial

intrusion in the Malaysian Archipelago.

Conrad's concern with European intervention in the Far East region is a

persistent fundamental issue in his fiction. Fifteen years after he wrote Lord Jim, in

Victory he seemed to be still anxious about the way in which Europe meddled in the

affairs of the Orient and how i t considered the Other or non-European to be its infenor.

In fact, one can easily detect in this later novel Conrad's disapproval of the impenal

mission in this region of the world. Although Victory is usually approached by critics in

terms of the moral issues it raises about human existence in general, we still believe that

it also retains an anti-irnperialist message attacking the European image-making of the

Other as inferior, aligning it with the other two novek studied in this thesis. The vast

thernatic and philosophical scope of Victory, the host of its diverse characters and the

subtlety of its stylistic fabric - al1 these enclose a wide range of meanings of which anti-

imperialism is one. The novel is so inclusive in its concerns and references and so

refined in its rhetorical and allegorical systems of signification that it cornes close to an

encyclopaedic store covering al1 aspects of human experience, as these were able to

transpire in the imperial adventure. A conscientious solicitation of the entire store

wouId be a literary enterprise that both vivifies and edifies the human intellect. Our

task, however, is to concentrate in this novel on what we believe has often been little

dealt with by the majonty of the Conrad critics, namely, its anti-colonial overtones. In

Victory, as in the earlier two novels, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Conrad exposes

the deficiencies of the imperial ideology and the injuries of its practices. In Vicrory,

more particularly, Conrad focuses on the vulnerability and helplessness of one kind of

colonial protagonist as he enters into conflict with the overpowering forces of

impendism. As in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, the fail of the protagonist here in

Victory is paradoxicaily the outcome of his inability to resist the detrimental work of

empire in the colonized sphere. The image of itself that Europe has created by

constructing the image of the Other is the vehicle of its own destruction.

Baron Axel Heyst, the protagonist of Victory, is probably Conrad's most

fascinating character. A detached wandering Swede in one of the Far East islands,

Heyst leads a life of complete seclusion and aloofhess. Frorn his father he has inherited

the icy philosophy of negation, indifference and non-involvement in humankind. Life to

this Heyst, as to the elder Heyst, is a mere chimera, a figment of one's imagination,

where everything is shadowy, faint and false. Man is simply an insignificant creature

that has almost no control over its destiny: "Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident

which does not stand close investigation" (196). This is the lesson Heyst has learned

from his father. As one of the reviewers of Conrad's Victory puts it, " Axel Heyst" is

"an indifferentist, an onlooker on life, preserving an aloofness from the activities and

passions of men, because of his conviction of the futility of existence7' (Sherry, 287). As

such, the vainness of human endeavour and the senselessness of Iife are the foremost

aphorisms of Heyst's philosophy and the shaping outlines of his actions and his

existence. Heyst tries to live out this existence isolated - so he thinks - with a male

Chinese servant called Wang, on a South Sea island.

But, unfortunately, Heyst's philosophy of life proves to be dysfunctional and

deficient against the forces of evil that are ever present in the human interaction that he

encounters. No matter how distant and isoiated fkom others he might be, Heyst c m

shield neither himself nor those under his protection from the machinations of evil. In

the novef, the forces of evil are brilliantly incarnated in such a character as Schornberg,

whose misanthropy and hatred, especially towards Heyst, bnngs about the latter's

downfall. On another island than Hyest's called Sourabaya, one of the tropical ports in

the Far East, the German Schomberg is a hotelkeeper. Gossip is his soie and favourite

means of diverting hirnself and his customers and of conducting d l his human

relationships. Conrad writes of him: "[hl e was a noxious ass, and he satisfied his lust

for silly gossip at the cost of his customers" (20). Heyst, who sometimes stops over at

Schomberg's hotel on business trips, falls victim to the hotelkeeper's idIe tittle-tattie,

The "indifferentist" philosopher begins his path to being killed by gossip. Schomberg

takes Heyst's aloofhess not as a philosophicai stance but as snobbery and arrogance and

starts to develop a gratuitous hatred of him. This hatred grows into a malevoient desire

for revenge for the fact that Heyst saves Lena, a woman who is a member of the

orchestra that plays in Schomberg's hotel, from the cruelty of her bandmaster and from

the lustful pursuits of the sex-starved Schomberg himself. When Heyst furtively leaves

with this young woman for Samburan, the island of his hermitage, Schomberg's ire,

spite and frustration are such that he contrives a scheme to bnng about the death of the

two elopers. Schomberg's scheme consists in convincing three wicked desperadoes,

who wander malignantly from island to island in the Far East and who happen to visit

the table d'hôte of his hotel, that Heyst is a rogue who hides a huge treasure al1 for

himself on his island. He informs them that Heyst lives there alone with no more than

the Chinese servant Wang. Before iong, Mr. Jones, the leader of the three villains,

Martin Ricardo, his secretary, and Pedro, iheir servant, set sail in pursuit of Heyst and

his treasure. Their amval at Samburan fulfills Schomberg's scheme and ail - Heyst, Mr.

Jones, Ricardo and Pedro - die in a most p e s o m e "murderous contest" (Sherry, 288).

This is the story of Victory as a whole. But this is sirnply the outward story. A

real appreciation of the novel requires a serious consideration of its subtexts and

overtones. in one of the unsigned reviews in Sherry's coliection, Conrad: The critical

Heritage, the reviewer says that at the end of Victory "we appear to be witnessing not a

murderous contest between men, but a struggle between the spiritual powers of the

universe temporarily incarnate in a little group of human beings on a lonely Pacific

island" (Sherry, 288). Of course, any reader in early twentieth-century England wouId

not question the validity of the view that this summed up the substance of the novel,

particularly when we know that the review was published in 1915, that is, during a

period when EngIish imperialisrn had not started yet to be a major concem in literary

debate. At the tirne, it would have never occurred to the literary critic as we1I as to the

contemporary reader to argue openly that the novel rnight have had an anti-imperialist

vein. This is true despite the fact that Conrad's novels such as Heart of Darkness, Lord

Jirn, Nostrorno and Under Western Eyes, which we now consider as his main anti-

colonialist productions, had been published before Victory came into existence. If

Conrad's fiction continues to raise major issues in recent postcoIonia1 studies, it is

because they both defy and transcend the spatial and temporal contexts in which they

have been produced. We Say this because we have detected in the fabric of Victory an

underlying anti-imperialist thread that links it with the other two novels of Our study,

narnel y, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, while what the unsigned review said of it as a

war of spirituai powers is also true. Thus, "the spiritual powers of the universe", to

which the unknown reviewer of Victory alludes, can be considered in the context of our

study as the ultimate dimension of the inevitabie and sweeping forces of imperialisrn to

which the colonial protagonist faiIs victim.

The general framework in which Conrad's characters move and act in Victory is

suggested early to the reader in the opening pages of the novel. The action of the novel

takes place mainly on two remote Pacific islands, Sourabaya and Samburan. The first is

a tropical port where many sea traders conduct their commercial transactions and where

they rest after long sea voyages. The second island, Samburan, was at one time used as

a coal out-station administered by an English-Dut& corporation. On Sarnburan, or "the

Round Island" (3, Heyst was once the manager of one of the c o d stations belonging to

the Tropical Belt Coal Company. But the Company "went into liquidation" (5) and his

final task for it consisted in digging out the island's resources of coal and shipping them

to Europe.

And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine there, with an outcrop in the hillside Iess than five hundred yards frorn the rickety wharf and the imposing blackboard- The company's object had been to get hoId of al1 the outcrops on tropical islands and exploit them localIy. And, Lord knows, there were any amount of outcrops. It was Heyst who had to locate most of them in this part of the tropical belt during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a ready letter-writer had wntten pages and pages about them to his f ~ e n d s in Europe. At Ieast, so it was said- (5-6)

It is clear, then, that Conrad's first objective in this novel is to draw the reader's

attention to the presence of European trade in the Far East region. In fiis description of

Samburan, the unidentified fiame narrator points to the remnants and traces of a recently

failed mercantile operation:

On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan - the "Round Island" of the charts - was dazzling; and in the flood of clod light Heyst could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of an abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle: vague roofs above low vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long grass, something Iike an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged thickets towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with a black jetty and a rnound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted side. But the most conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard raised on two posts and presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over that side, the white letters "T. B. C. C." in a row at least two feet bigh. These were the initials of the Tropical Belt C o d Company, his employers-his late employers, to be precise. (5)

Not only does the setting descnbed in these Iines suggest the presence of a European

trade force in the Orient but also the role that each character has to play in this setting is

rneant to give further impetus to this presence- As a matter of fact, a close scrutiny of

the symbolic dimensions of several characters in Victory reveals to us that each of them

is assigned a specific role to play in an environment of impenal contest. The first

character to consider is Heyst bimseif. Like Kurtz in the Congo and Iike Lord Jim in

Patusan, in Samburan Heyst is presented to us as the representative of Europe and the

promoter of its commercial &airs in the region. Although the cornpany he works for

has gone banknipt, Heyst, "styled in the prospectus 'manager of the tropics', remaineci at

his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-station of the company" (5). That Heyst is

invested by Conrad with the role of a manager of a now defunct coal company in the Far

East is not insignificant. Conrad's intention behind this is to show, as he does in Heart

ofDarkness and LordJim, that the imperid enterprise might sometimes be detrimental

even to its own promoters. The failure of Europe's image of the Other is revealed by the

collapse of its own image as the superior person.

But this becomes entirely clear only when we consider the sqmbolic function of

other characters in the drama- These are, in particular, Gentleman Jones, Martin

Ricardo, Pedro and Wang. Their function in the novel is to represent the devastating

power of imperialism and the violence of its practices. The most significant of the three

evil characters is Jones, an English villain who pretends to gentlernanliness in order to

cheat people in card games and steal their money with the help of his two aficionados.

Like Gentleman Brown in Lord Jim who is introduced as the instrument of Jim's

destruction, Gentleman Jones here, in Victory, is also introduced as the instrument of

Heyst7s destruction. When Heyst asks him about his identity, Mr. Jones replies, "1 am

the world itseIf, corne to pay you a visit. In another sense 1 am an outcast - almost an

outlaw. If you prefer a less materialistic view, I am a sort of fate - the retribution that

waits its time" (379). For Heyst's part, being a European manager in the Far East is

extremely significant in the sense that he is to be aligned with such a villainous

European character as the Engiish Mr. Jones. Not that they share the sarne villainy but

they share the same background of the supposed supenor image of the colonizer. For

both are Europeans and both have interests in the Far East. The sole difference is that

they do not use the sarne rnethods to ensure those interests. Heyst robs the island of its

coal in a mercantile, socially respectable way, whereas Jones robs everybody and

everything in the Far East, no matter whether the method is guile or force. In one of his

reveaiing utterances, Jones refers to this when he tells Heyst: "We pursue the sarne ends

... only perhaps 1 pursue them with more openness than you - with more simplicity"

(320). In mother instance, Jones also refers, "with languid irony", to his and Heyst's

common belonging: " It's obvious that we belong to the same - social sphere" (378).

And soon aftenvards, he reminds the detached Heyst that they "have much more in

common than you think" (321). In a sense, we can Say that Jones and his two followers

stand as the syrnbols of imperid greed that cornes to infest and devastate the state of

affairs in Samburan and the Far East in general. But this irnperia1 greed, however, as

Conrad certainly suggests, does not divide in the novel the Europeans from the non-

Europeans in their fate. The image of the European cannot exist without the image of

the colonized, Like Kurtz in Heart of D~rkness and Jim in Lord J h , Heyst in Victory

falls victim to the blind imperial rapacity that he seems to convey. Thus, Heyst7s

hopeless struggie against the forces of evil, as incarnated in the characters of Jones,

Ricardo and Pedro, tums out to be a stmggie against the imperîal forces that are dnven

by greed and hunger for wealth that h e himself perversely also represents. In the face of

the propagation of this evil, Wang escapes temporarily into the jungle, back to nature,

where the Cod Company and the three thieves have not yet spread their bait.

In the end we could Say that the deterioration of the colonial protagonist in each

of the three novels under study in this thesis is due basically to the Limitations of the

colonial ideology that it is meant to represent. The biased and stereotyped perception of

the indigenous Other is a fundamental limitation that lies at the core of the colonial

ideology of the image of the self as superior. In fact, it is because of this limitation that

the colonial enterprise in Victory tums out to be a fiasco. Denying the humanity of other

races or dominating them because they are different is proved to be a shortsighted view

that causes many injuries and those who suffer these injuries are both the colonizer and

the colonized. In Hearr of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory, Conrad shows how the

inadequacy of colonial ideology leads to practices that victimize the colonizer as well as

the colonized. In order to highlight the stnking limitation of perceiving the Other in

colonid ideology, Conrad oftentimes brings to the fore the hurnanity of the indigenous

races, and by underscoring the inherent humanity in the native, as it is the case of the

cannibals in Heart of Darkness, the Arab pilgrims in Lord Jim and the Chinaman in

Victory, Conrad's purpose is to shake the ground upon which the colonizer clairns to

superiority. Zn Victory, it is not Heyst but Wang who first senses the depth of the evil

that Jones conveys. That the colonized is no less human and no more savage than the

colonizer himself constitutes Conrad's reaction to impenalism and its practices.

Moreover, the death of the protagonist in each of the three novels fulfills a

double function. On the one hand, it is the result of imperial forces that seek material

profit at any rate. On the other hand, i t is meant to be a kind of admonition to awaken

European powers to the atrocity of their imperid practices that the European may inflict

on himself. However, the fact that the three noveIs end with a pessimistic tone should

not screen from u s Conrad's optimistic evocations in them. Time after time Conrad

alludes to the possibiIity of transcending the racial and cultural boundaries that set the

colonizer and the colonized apart. But here again what is needed as a prerequisite to

make this crossing of boundanes feasible is the recognition of the Other's humanity and

difference. Only when this humanity and this difference are accepted and respected

shall human fellowship find the propitious soi1 to grow and flourish.

bittemess the misery from which his country and his compatriots suffered under

Russian, Geman and Austrian dominations. Ln his autobiographical works as well as in

his letters, Conrad makes straighfforward references to the balefûl manoeuvres to which

his country was subjected by imperial forces.

In the second chapter we tried to elucidate Conrad's anti-imperialism by studying

his narrative techniques and his use of Ianguage as an equivocal and shifting system of

signification that reflects the shakiness and volatility of imperial values. The

multiplicity of perspectives, the unreliabiiity of the narrative voice and the deficiency of

Ianguage in conveying the compiexity of human experience - al1 of these, in the novels

we studied, came to reflect the precariousness of any human constnrct, including the

colonial ideology itself. Referring to Nietzsche's philosophic worldviews, which had a

considerabie influence on Conrad's art of fiction, we attempted to show how the

indeterminacy and the indefiniteness of language in Conrad's three novek were meant to

highlight the relativism and scepticism that accompanied man's search for

epistemologkal certainties. Our eventual contention, therefore, was that the absence of

a definite, ultirnate, self-sustained meaning in each of these noveis was to echo the

absence of a moral authority in colonial thought and colonial practices.

The precariousness of colonial thought, as reflected in Conrad's three novels,

could also be informed by the kind of relationship that exists between the colonizer and

the colonized. In our third chapter, we tried to explore the historical origins of this

relationship and its psychological dimensions and repercussions. Relying on Said's

histonographical study of the West-East opposition and on Bhabha's psychological

analysis of the colonial stereotype, we came to learn a great deal about the way in which

the colonizer perceived and constructed the colonized. In Heurt of Darkness, Lord Jim

and Victory, we saw how the colonizer's perception of the colonized Other has

constantly depended on contradictory stereotypical parameters. Fear and fascination,

desire and derision, were revealed to be distinctive sentiments that define the colonizer's

ideological construction of the colonized.

In our fourth and fifth chapters, we contended that because of the colonizer's

Iimited and flawed perception of the colonized Other the impenal enterprise in the three

novels in question was a total failure. Each protagonist in these novels is doomed to

death because he belongs to an overpowering system of beIiefs that is based solely on

material profit. hperialism in these novels is depicted as a degrading and

dehumanizing enterprise that refuses to acknowledge the racial and cultural differences

of those it exploits. By emphasizing the humanity of the indigenous race in each novel

and by denouncing the white European's behaviour in the colony, Conrad lays an

inevocable charge against imperialism and its practices. The deterioration of the

colonial protagonist in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Vicrory is understood as his

ultimate attack upon colonial ideology.

The essential greatness of Conrad lies in his ability to transcend the Euro-centric

preconceptions of colonial thought and to open up new spaces for cross-cultural

interaction and exchange between Europeans and non-Europeans. Conrad

acknowledges, at least in the three novels we chose to study, that the non-European is

endowed with a humanity that is as worthy as that of the European himself. Conrad's

treatment of the indigenous races in ihese novels somehow subverts the entrenched

colonial tradition of perceiving and representing the Other. By restoring and

reintegrating the real identity to the native, Conrad deflates the European's claim to

superiority and challenges the ethnocentncity of his colonial presumptions. in such

novels as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory, the reader therefore traces the first

step towards a postcolonial outlook that hinges upon recognized cultural differences and

self-acknowledged limitations. It is for this reason most certainly that Conrad and his art

of fiction continue to occupy solidly such a crucial and prominent place in post-colonial

debates.

Yet, Conrad's fiction not only interests post-colonial cntics such as Said,

Bhabha, Achebe, JanMohamed, Lord, to name only a few, but also appeals to a great

number of contemporary novelists who have emerged from a variety of colonial

backgrounds. Although Conrad's novels keep provoking endless controversies

conceming the validity of the moral and political significances of these modem

postcolonial novelists, they still remain models to be emulated by them. A perfect

example of this is found in V. S. Naipaul's novel, A Bend In The River, (1979), that, as

Gene M. Moore puts it, "retells the story of 'Heart of Darkness' from 'the other side',

from the perspective of the Islamic and Hindu colonidism of the east Coast of Afiica"

(Stape, 232). The Sudanese writer Tayyib Sdih, in his novel Season of Migration tu the

North (1969), also reverses Marlow's journey up the Congo River by directing his

protagonist's voyage towards England itself (Stape, 232).

What is also remarkable about Conrad's three novels is that they deal with issues

that are now considered as post-modernist ones, Such notions as "Death of the Author'',

"multiplicity of perspectives" and "open-endednessn, which are viewed as exclusiveIy

post-modernist techniques of narration, were already developed by Conrad at the

beginning of the twentieth century. Not only was Conrad a writer ahead of his time but

aiso the artistic and moral visions that he began to articulate a century ago seem now to

provide the groundwork for contemporary postcolonial writers to found their own views.

In Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory, Conrad's use of language as a deficient

signifying instrument and his adoption of several narrative perspectives reduce the

irnperial ideology to a highly questionable and dubious human construct- In a sense,

these novels and their respective narrative modes come to subvert the historicity of

imperialism as a human system of thought and conduct. More than seventy years after

Conrad's death, Michael Ondaatje, a contemporary Sri Lankian-Canadian wnter, uses

the same devices and redresses the same issue in his recent postcoIonia1 novel, In the

Skin of a Lion (1996). What Ondaatje attempts to do in this novel is to understand the

nature of Toronto's colonial history. In the same way Conrad redefines the nature of

impenal history through the personal histones of Kurtz, Jirn and Heyst, Ondaatje also

tries to come to terms with a historical sense of the colonial experience through the

persona1 histories of Patrick, Clara and Alice. If Conrad uses memory as a narrative

device'by which the personal histories of his heroes in the three novels are being re-

defined in the actual act of telling, Ondaatje also uses in his novel the sarne device in

telling and, at the same tirne, shaping the histories of his heroes. The closest and most

important aKinity between the two writers, despite their distance in terms of space and

time, is that both try to dehistoricize the colonial context in favour of a larger context

where human beings, no matter their racial and cultural differences, can CO-exist and

share mutual experiences,

In Conrad's three novels, the native is being depicted in his own geographical

space, that is, in the colony. With many contemporary postcolonial wnters, however,

this native is transporteu to the heart of the empire itself. When Conrad struggIes to give

a certain identity whether to the black Afncans in Heart of Darkness or to the Arab

pilgnms and the Bugis tribes in Lord JUn or to the Chinaman in Victory, his intention is

to look for possibilities of bringing both colonizer and colonized together. When we

read such novel as The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) by the Anglo-Pakistani writer Hanif

Kureishi, we k d out that it de& with the same issue of cultural integration of both

colonizer and colonized, but this time in the geographical space of the former, that is, in

the heart of the former Empire itself. it is quite noteworthy that the cultural clash

between the natives and the colonizers in Conrad's three novels is being re-echoed in the

struggie of Kureishi's protagonist, Karirn Amir, to understand his half-English half-

Indian identity. In a sense, Conrad's endeavour to bridge the cultural gap between the

native and his colonial oppressor is being taken up here by Kureishi as he makes his

protagonist transcend the racial prejudices of London society in the turmoil years of the

nineteen sixties. The influence of Conrad on such postcolonial wnters as Kureishi is no

better articulated than in what Bob Shacochis says in The New York Times and which

appears on the back cover of The Buddha of Suburbin: "Conrad, Orwell, Forster - be

proud, eh, boys? Or at least admit your complicity, that long-ago act of patemity. The

Buddha of Suburbia is your handsorne dark grandchild, come to the home shores to

illuminate hearts".

What we wish to emphasize in the end is not how far the postcolonial outlook has

changed since Conrad's death but how much modern-day postcolonial studies and

postcolonial artistic productions are inspired by and indebted to his works and moral

visions. His persona1 background, his innovative techniques of narration, his unbiased

representation of the colonized native and his indictment of imperialism and ils practices

- al1 of these make of Conrad not only a remarkable figure in present-day postcolonial

research but also a mode1 to be emulated by a wide range of international postcolonial

writers. What makes Conrad an appeding figure to most contemporary postcolonial

cntics and writers alike is his deep understanding of the colonial condition and its

dynarnics. In short, Conrad's erosion of the colonial ideology, his sympathy towards the

oppressed races and his insistence on cultural exchange as a first foundation for any

potential change are the characteristic features of his fictional art that we tried to

highlight in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Victory.

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