What happens to men when they live away from women? Conrad, in 'Heart of Darkness' provides Marlow with an aunt who gets him a job with the Belgian Congo Company. Startlingly, its front office is manned by two tricoteuses female knitters (like Madam Defarge) who, it is said, relished watching the guillotine chop the heads off aristocrats. Perhaps the two two knitters also stand for the weavers of fate or some other such grand guignol shite. What is certain is that Kurtz wouldn't have gone off his rocker if he had gotten married and had wifey with him to keep him on the straight and narrow. Conrad points to the need women back home had to think their nephews or fiancees were going out on 'civilizing missions' rather than expeditions of piracy or extortion.
The Congo Free State was a private, profit making enterprise which was granted territory previously divided up between various competing African kingdoms or confederacies. The King of Belgium was the absolute monarch of the territory which, however, would go to France if his private wealth was not enough to cover costs. The idea was that the territory would be run profitably on up to date and humanitarian lines. Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' isn't a satire of Imperialism of the British, French, Spanish or any other type. It was a satire on late nineteenth century private enterprise adopting the mask of Free Trade. Open Competition, & Humanitarian concern with eliminating the Slave Trade and so forth.
I may mention, Sierra Leone & Liberia- ruled by the descendants of freed American slaves- extracted wealth from the indigenous people in a comparable manner to King Leopold. Edmund Blyden, the father of Pan-Africanism, is an example of a Black writer critical of Black rulers who exploit the indigenous population. Incidentally, there were Black Sea Captains operating in the area at the same time as Conrad & his ilk. The Merchant Navy was racially mixed. It wasn't 'Imperial' or elitist. It was commercial & people from different continents rubbed along with each other well enough.
Marlow says of his Aunt (the one who got him this shitty job with a bunch of Continental spivs)-
It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
Late Victorian women may have been stupid & ignorant. But late Twentieth Century Professors of Literature were stupider & more ignorant yet. Edward Said was a case in point. He thought Marlow & Kurtz were Colonial Civil Servants, rather than employees of private concerns, and that the Free State was an Imperial project, as opposed to a commercial venture.
Said also seems to be unaware that there were African Empires- e.g. that of Ethiopia which defeated Italy in 1896- and Republics like Sierra Leone & Liberia. Sadly, the great Ashanti Empire was conquered in 1901 while the Kingdom of Kongo had gone under around 1860.
Edward Said, “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness”
Culture and Imperialism, (1993) pp. 22-31
This imperial attitude is, I believe, beautifully captured in the complicated and rich narrative form of Conrad's great novella Heart of Darkness, written between 1898 and 1899.
The Imperial attitude, for the Brits, involved setting up courts and appointing Chiefs & recruiting and training and sending out District officers who had passed competitive examinations or had graduated from prestigious universities. Under no circumstances would such an official have any involvement in commercial activity.
On the one hand, the narrator Marlow acknowledges the tragic predicament of all speech-that "it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's
existence-that which makes its truth, its meaning- its subtle and penetrating essence . . ..
We live, as we dream-alone" -
This could be said of anyone at any time. It has nothing to do with Imperialism or Capitalism or anything else.
yet still manages to convey the enormous power of Kurtz’s African experience
the thing was shabby. It was 'sharp practice'. In the short run, there is a windfall. Medium to long-term, you destroy the market.
through his own overmastering narrative
it isn't overmastering. It is impressionistic. Marlow is depicted a Buddha like figure, still 'following the Sea' (i.e. he is a failure- unlike the Company Director & the Lawyer & the Accountant who have found good berths in the City), who appears entirely ignorant of English history. He thinks the Roman colonists had simply 'squeezed' the natives. They hadn't. They had created a highly efficient administration which greatly raised productivity & created a Romanized land-owning class who lived in well built villas with central heating and plunge pools & imported luxuries from the East.
Conrad, of course, came from Poland- which had never known Roman civilization- but his readers were English. Thus Conrad is careful to present Marlow not as a shrewd enough old salt, but an addle pated Buddha. Perhaps he'd spent too much time with the lascars smoking opium. Or maybe he was just stupid. The narrator says 'to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside'. This is the Marxist doctrine as understood in Harcourt's England where everybody was a 'Socialist' in the sense that stories aren't self-contained. They refer outside themselves to some 'collective action problem' Society needs to solve.
Marlow, not, evidently, a man of much educations asks his better bred (or merely more successful) comrades to imagine 'a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”
Why is this silly? The Brits were Celts just like the Gauls. The had been familiar to the Romans for centuries. Indeed, this decent young citizen might have had a Celtic wet nurse if he was not a Romanized Celt himself. Everything in England was comprehensible thanks to Caesar whose raid preceded Claudian colonization by a century.
My point is, Marlow's narrative isn't 'overmastering'. It is idiosyncratic save in so far as it is merely idiotic.
of his voyage into the African interior toward Kurtz.
a series of misadventures. We get that the Free State is the opposite of 'efficient'.
Mind,” he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower—“Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this.
No Englishman would. London had never been 'one of the dark places of the world'. Even if our Druids did sacrifice kiddies, that was best practice at the time. Look at Abraham.
What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency.
Fuck off! Efficiency was the slogan of the 'Progressive Movement' in the US in the 1890s. It had nothing to do with the City of London or the British Merchant Navy which had evolved ways of 'muddling through' well enough. You might say, the British management style involved 'satisficing' & 'regret minimization' rather than optimization or profit maximization.
I suppose, for Conrad's generation, the Congo was associated with, the explorer, Stanley whom they may have thought off as an American journalist concerned with success, self-promotion & 'efficiency'. Actually Stanley was from a very poor Welsh family and had gone to the US after coming of age.
But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect.
Claudius's conquest of England was rapid. It wasn't a 'squeeze'. It lasted 400 years.
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
Nope. Rome had sound finances. If you can hire the strong, you aren't weak. But for that you need money.
They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.
Thanks to the Board School, even the factory worker knew that the Romans hadn't simply beaten and robbed the natives. It wasn't till 1980, that you had a play staged at the National Theatre where 'the Romans in Britain' are shown as sodomizing Druids. This was meant as an allegory of England's illegal occupation of Northern Ireland, where trillions of IRA Druids were being buggered senseless by Lord Mountbatten. Needless to say, the occupation of Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire, Kilburn, Brixton & Islamabad (Bethnal Green) is equally illegal & features incessant anal rape of disabled Lesbians of colour.
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
The Boer War involved killing White people. But it was the German resistance in Africa during the Great War which pointed to why and how Congo could suffer yet more under African war-lords- provided valuable minerals were discovered there.
What redeems it is the idea only. 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 sacrifice to....”
This was not the British view. The Navy kept the home islands safe. But Navies cost money. Thus the Navy needed to pay for itself through trans-oceanic commerce. Empire was the forcible export of an 'invisible'- a tangible service rather than an idea. Any fucker can have an idea. Patriots, provided they are paid enough, can provide services which help keep the home island safe. Sadly, this might involve dying of dysentery in Delhi or of malaria in Malawi or cholera in Chile.
This narrative in turn is connected directly with the redemptive force, as well as the waste and horror, of Europe's mission in the dark world.
No. The narrative isn't overmastering. Casement's narrative was. Conrad wasn't in the business of providing atrocity literature. There is some nameless horror in Conrad just as there is in Henry James. The Congo isn't different from the Cheltenham. There is a heart of darkness everywhere where hearts are.
Whatever is lost or elided or even simply made up in Marlow's immensely compelling
recitation is compensated for in the narrative's sheer historical momentum, the temporal
forward movement-with digressions, descriptions, exciting encounters, and all.
Marlow isn't Sindbad the fucking Sailor. He pretty much reveals the whole plot when he mentions that he got the job in the Congo because his predecessor there had beaten an elderly Chieftain. The son of that old man had stuck a spear in the Viking's back. Apparently the man had been a perfect baa-lamb but two years working for the Company had taken their toll. In plain terms- this was a fucking Mafia operation underneath all the 'mission statement' bumf. Touch pitch & you will be defiled.
Within the narrative of how he journeyed to Kurtz's Inner Station, whose source and authority he now becomes,
Kurtz suspects that he is being recalled to face charges. Such is not the case. The truth is the whole enterprise if a shambles.
Marlow moves backward and forward materially in small and large spirals, very much the way episodes in the course of his journey up-river are then
incorporated by the principal forward trajectory into what he renders as "the heart of
Africa."
Jerome K Jerome does a better job in 'three men & a boat'. The passage on Runnymede, the source from which our liberties spring, is quite lyrical. The 'heart of Africa'- for me is intimately connected with reading 'three men in a boat' in Kisumu when I was 11 years old.
Thus Marlow's encounter with the improbably white-suited clerk
Accountant
in the middle of the jungle furnishes him with several digressive paragraphs,
No. There is 'foreshadowing'. There's something a bit 'off' about the accountant. He says Kurtz might be taken into the 'administration'. The chaps in Europe have heard about him. But, we suspect, they have also heard about the Accountant. There's something wrong with both of them. That's why the Accountant doesn't want to put any message of his own to Kurtz in writing.
as does his meeting after with the semi-crazed, harlequin-like Russian who has been so affected by Kurtz's gifts.
Some talents are from the Devil.
Yet underlying Marlow's inconclusiveness, his evasions, his arabesque meditations on his feelings and ideas, is the unrelenting course of the journey itself, which, despite all the many obstacles, is sustained through the jungle, through time, through hardship, to the heart of it all, Kurtz's ivory-trading empire.
He is an agent, not a principal. He sends a lot of ivory down river. But how does he get it? It is banal to say he beats niggers till their families fetch him what he wants. The suggestion is that he is engaging in some sort of Satanic Mass which might appeal to these savages. Does it involve cannibalism? Or is he is a Vampire- like Count Dracula?
Conrad wants us to see how Kurtz's great looting adventure, Marlow's journey up the river, and the narrative itself all share a common theme: Europeans performing acts of imperial mastery and will in (or about) Africa.
Arabs or Africans could do it just as well. This wasn't 'imperial mastery'. It was laissez faire 'primitive accumulation' which people of all colours can go in for.
What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his
contemporaries is that,
he wasn't a Colonial writer. He was a merchant seaman who wrote about stuff blokes got up to on boats.
for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system,
he was no such thing. He worked for different shipping companies- some French, some British, some Belgian.
he was so self-conscious about what he did.
He knew he wasn't a Colonial Civil Servant or an officer in the Royal Navy. He was a naturalized British citizen but he never served the Crown.
Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow's adventures:
because he was an artist
it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions,
No. He sailed on various different seas and oceans. He didn't wander in any colony whatsoever. Congo was a Free State not a Belgian Colony.
telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place.
Because he was a naturalized Briton & lived in Britain where his books were published.
That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad's way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890s the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business.
Fuck off! Americans were sailing in the same oceans but wanted no colonies. Before there were maritime Empires, there were merchant adventurers. Conrad served in the Merchant Navy- not the Royal Navy- and thus meets business people not colonial soldiers or administrators.
(Coincidentally we should note that at about the same time Halford Mackinder,
an academic who was one of the first Directors of the LSE
an explorer,
Not a distinguished one though he did climb Mt. Kenya. But, by then the great age of Stanley & Livingstone was over. Mackinder raised up the discipline of Geography and introduced the term geopolitics.
geographer, and Liberal Imperialist gave a series of lectures on imperialism at the London Institute of Bankers perhaps Conrad knew about this.)
No. Mackinder was part of Haldane's 'Coefficients' circle. HG Wells knew him. Older men like James & Conrad had zero interest in that shite.
Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow's narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism,
Nonsense! If the darkies get their act together they can chuck out Whitey. Ethiopia defeated Italy in 1896. Then came the Second Boer War. It revealed that if a bunch of Africans or Asians got access to something with high value-to-weight- e.g. if they find gold or diamonds- then they could buy superior guns to those supplied to Colonial Armies. Sailors, like Conrad, weren't stupid. They could see there were smart lascars who could easily get up to speed in the use of any type of technology. Once it became more profitable for the natives to get rid of the colonist, that is exactly what would happen. The alternative was a system of subsidies to native Chiefs. There would have to be a more equitable distribution of the gains from trade. But, in that case, how would 'public goods' be paid for- e.g. freedom of the Seas & suppression of internecine tribal or communal violence?
and that it has the power of a system representing as well as peaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.
What Marlow does is register the bad working conditions in the place & lend plausibility to the revelations he makes. The sad part is a distinguished British soldier had been the first governor of that shithole.
Yet neither Conrad nor Marlow gives us a full view of what is outside the world-conquering attitudes embodied by Kurtz, Marlow, the circle of listeners on the deck of
the Nellie~, and Conrad.
These guys aren't soldiers or statesmen. They are lower middle class merchant seamen & accountants & commercial agents.
By that I mean that Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist,
No. An Imperial politics & aesthetic would focus on the Governor & his relations with various native Chieftains. Prominent roles would be given to handsome soldiers & saintly missionaries & the beautiful daughter of the visiting Royal Duke.
which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable.
Only to this cretin. There is no Imperialism in Henry James or Joseph Conrad. They were foreigners who chose to settle in England.
For if we cannot truly understand someone else's experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle
Mosquito comes to bite Kurtz. He says 'fuck off! I'm white'. The Mosquito apologises and flies away. The same thing happens when a lion or a hippo tries to eat him.
or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator,
black people were not allowed to narrate things.
there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable.
Said couldn't think. He was too stupid.
The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aestherica1ly but also mentally unassailable.
Imperialism means Kings under an Emperor & Dukes & Counts & Barons under those Kings. In the Congo, about 90 percent of the land was declared the private property of the Belgian King in his private capacity. He leased it out to private companies who forcibly extracted resources. This brutal system was 'mentally assailable' by journalists, politicians (e.g. Herbert Samuel), Colonial officials (e.g. Roger Casement) and travellers and writers of any description. Indeed, the Free State was so vigorously assailed that it was scrapped. The Belgian Government had to take the place over & turn it into a proper colony.
Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow's tale in a narrative moment
a tale is a narrative is a story is an account. This is the case whether you are self-conscious or unconscious.
that he allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history,
Imperialism maintains its chronicles from which Imperial history is written. It neither swallows it up or shits on it.
was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history,
a tale is a narrative & history is part of larger history.
one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie.
These guys were travelling all over the place. There was no tight circle.
As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty.
No. He says that when he was young there was a lot of blank space in the map of Africa because explorers & cartographers hadn't penetrated that far. Then Livingstone & Stanley & Speake & so forth filled the thing out.
Conrad could probably never have used Marlow to present anything other than an
imperialist world-view,
He represented no such thing. He didn't write about colonies but about Free States or Native States or Latin American Republics
given what was available for either Conrad or Marlow to see of the non-European at the time.
They could see plenty of African ruled or Indian ruled or Arab ruled or Latin American ruled places.
Independence was for whites
Black Ethiopians kicked Italy's ass in the 1890s. White Boers didn't get independence. They were defeated.
and Europeans; the lesser or subject peoples were to be ruled;
Subjects are ruled regardless of colour.
science, learning, history emanated from the West.
The West was ahead in Science but plenty of its scholars were studying the languages & history of the East. The reverse was even more true.
True, Conrad scrupulously recorded the differences between the disgraces of Belgian and
British colonial attitudes, but he could only imagine the world carved up into one or
another Western sphere of dominion.
No. Ethiopia had won. How soon before other African potentates acquired modern weapons?
But because Conrad also had an extraordinarily persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality,
he was a gloomy Guss- no question. But in the Merchant Navy, you had all sorts.
he quite carefully (some would say maddeningly) qualified Marlow's narrative with the provisionality that came from standing at the very juncture of this world with another, unspecified but different.
Davy Jones's fucking locker. Marlowe was a man of the sea. The Sea has its mysteries.
Conrad was certainly not a great imperialist entrepreneur like Cecil Rhodes or Frederick Lugard,
nor was he the great White Queen
even though he understood perfectly how for each of them, in Hannah Arendt's words, to enter "the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion, he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement.")
Fuck off! Rhodes was a business man. Lugard was a soldier who went to work for a trading company in Africa. Sadly he failed to make headway against Swahili traders in the Karonga War. He was given a job with a Chartered Company- i.e. a precursor to proper Colonial government- in East Africa. He wasn't a businessman. He started off as a second rate hired gun but proved effective & rose in public esteem. But Uganda or Nigeria were run in a very different way from Rhodesia.
Conrad's realization is that if, like narrative, imperialism has monopolized the entice system of representation-
In India, Imperialism was quite long established. There were plenty of alternative 'systems of representation' in various languages and for various purposes. Within Britain, anti-Imperialist narratives dated back to the Chartists & even earlier. The scramble for Africa was recent.
which in the case of Heart of Darkness allowed it to speak for Africans as well as for Kurtz and the Other adventurers, including Marlow and his audience-your self-consciousness as an outsider can allow you actively to comprehend how the machine works, given that you and it arc fundamentally not in perfect synchrony or correspondence.
Gibberish! In the Free State, private enterprise was beating and killing natives so as to extract valuable raw materials- ivory, rubber, etc. King Leopold had perpetrated a fraud upon the Council of Europe. True, 'Arab' slave traders, or native potentates, may have been just as evil and rapacious, but they had not been granted the territory by the Berlin Congress. Anyone at all, irrespective of race or gender, could see that a fraud had been perpetrated.
Never the wholly incorporated and fully acculturated Englishman, Conrad therefore preserved an ironic distance in each of his works.
No. Marlow is English. He reports on what he saw. This was a commercial operation which was ab ovo fraudulent in that no humanitarian and philanthropic work was being done. Instead profit was being extracted in an unconscionable manner. This wasn't really free trade or a level playing field. Other African ventures were placed at a disadvantage because they had to play by stricter rules.
The form of Conrad's narrative has thus made it possible to derive two possible
arguments, two visions, in the post-colonial world that succeeded his.
Liberia & Sierra Leone were ruled by people of American slave descent. There was similar malpractice in their territory as was pointed out by an early Pan-Africanist. There was only one 'post-colonial' vision- viz. Africans would rise by their own hard-work, enterprise & possession of raw materials. Sadly, Africans could be as greedy and callous as King Leopold. There were always going to be commercial enterprises willing to use harsh measures so as to boost their bottom line.
One argument allows the old imperial enterprise full scope to play itself out conventionally, to render the world as official European or Western imperialism saw it, and to consolidate itself after World War Two.
Arguments were insufficient. Blood & Treasure had to be expended to that end.
Westerners may have physically left their old colonies in Africa
and Asia, but
they are still sodomizing the natives using invisible dicks. This is because Neoliberalism is very evil.
they retained them not only as markets
as did the Japanese & Chinese & Indians & so forth.
but as locales on the ideological map over which they continued to rule morally and intellectually.
No. Post-colonial societies retained the anti-Imperialist ideologies of the leaders of their Freedom Struggle.
"Show me the Zulu Tolstoy," as one American intellectual has recently put it.
Where is the American or British Tolstoy? Disparaging others doesn't mean you have ideological hegemony over them.
The assertive sovereign inclusiveness of this argument courses through the words of those who speak today for the West
where Said chose to live. Basically, he is miffed that it wasn't his ancestors who killed off the First Nations. Why is Arabic, not English, the language of the US? Is it because America is actually colonising Arabia & saying mean things about Arab peeps? I suppose so.
and for what the West did, as well as for wha1 the rest of the world is, was, and may be.
If the West says Said is real smart- a Professor no less!- he must be smart, right? But Said isn't smart. Similarly, even if the West says the East is shit, it doesn't become shit just because the West said so.
The assertions of this discourse exclude what has been represented as "lost" by arguing that the colonial world was in some ways ontologically speaking lost to begin with, irredeemable, irrecusably inferior.
Maybe Arabs are shit because ontology says so. Fuck you ontology! Fuck you very much!
Moreover, it focuses not on what was shared in the colonial experience, but on what must never be shared, namely the authority and rectitude that come with greater power and development
Like Germany with respect to Poland?
Rhetorically, its terms arc the organization of political passions, to borrow from Julien Benda's critique of modern intellectuals, terms which, he was~ sensible enough to know, lead inevitably to mass slaughter, and if not to literal mass slaughter then certainly to rhetorical slaughter.
Like Iranians shouting 'Death to America!'?
The second argument is considerably less objectionable. It sees itself as Conrad saw his
own narratives, local to a time and place, neither unconditionally true nor unqualifiedly
certain. As I have said, Conrad does not give us the sense that he could imagine a fully
realized alternative to imperialism the natives he wrote about in Africa, Asia, or America
were incapable of independence,
Yet that is what they were in Sierra Leone, Liberia & Ethiopia. Even after the end of the 'scramble for Africa', there was a lot of indirect Government or autonomous Kingdoms which were Protectorates not Colonies.
and because he seemed to imagine that European tutelage was a given, he could not foresee what would take place when it came to at end.
Yes he did. He was a sailor. He knew there were West African Ship Captains just like himself. Some operated out of Sierra Leone or Liberia which were ruled by African-American elites. The most famous was James Pinson Labulo Davies, formerly of the Royal Navy, who was captained commercial vessels from about 1852 onward.
But come to an end it would, if only because -like all human effort, like speech itself- it
would have its moment, then it would have to pass.
Things might get worse.
Since Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste (as in Nostromo),
set in a South American Republic not a fucking Colony. How ignorant was Said.
he permits his later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that Africa might be.
Conrad really didn't have any great knowledge or interest in the matter. Neither did his readers.
To return to the first line out of Conrad, the discourse of resurgent empire
Mobute's real name is Maugham. Nyerere's real name is Naylor-Smythe. The only black leader in Africa is Botha.
proves that the nineteenth-century imperial encounter continues today to draw lines and defend barriers.
Because King Leopold turned into a Zombie.
Strangely, it persists also in the enormously complex and quietly interesting interchange
between former colonial partners, say between Britain and India,
Boring shite
or between France and the Francophone countries of Africa.
Boring French shite.
But these exchanges tend to be overshadowed by the loud antagonisms of the polarized debate of pro- and anti-imperialists,
There are no pro-imperialists. That game was not worth the candle. One might as well demand the return of the Spanish Inquisition.
Said appears to understand that once Algeria became independent, anti-Imperialism became just as meaningless for France as for the English speaking world. However, with increasing immigration from Turd World ex-colonies, people like Rushdie might point a way forward. Indeed, the British Pakistanis might make him their Messiah.
Said quotes the following passage from an essay by Rushdie-
'We see that it can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as to create one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep. Outside the whale it becomes necessary, and even exhilarating, to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material, because politics is by turns farce and tragedy, and sometimes (e.g., Zia's Pakistan) both at once. Outside the whale the writer is obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, so that objectivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the impossibility of success. Outside the whale is the world of Samuel Beckett's famous formula: I can't go on, I'll go on
Rushdie did indeed go on and on. Nobody has yet been able to collect the price the Ayatollahs put on his head.
The terms of Rushdie's description, while they borrow from Orwell, seem to me to
resonate even more interestingly with Conrad. For here is the second consequence, the
second line leading out of Conrad's narrative form; in its explicit references to the
outside, it points to a perspective outside the basically imperialist representations
provided by Marlow and his listeners.
But Marlow & his listeners knew very well that you could have 'indirect rule'- this would involve sending the sons of Chiefs to a 'Chieftan's College'- or even independent Republics in Africa using West Indians or African Americans or whatever. This was the direction in which British protectorates were moving.
It is a profoundly secular perspective, and it is beholden neither to notions about historical destiny and the essentialism that destiny always seems to entail, nor to historical indifference and resignation. Being on the inside shuts out the full experience of imperialism, edits it and subordinates it to the dominance of one Eurocentric and totalizing view; this other perspective suggests the presence of a field without special historical privileges for one party.
Conrad went to Africa in 1890 a little before the fall of Dahomey & Ashanti. He knew what the alternative was. It was with that alternative that the Europeans and Arabs had been trading for the previous four centuries. In the Eighties, the question for African leaders was whether to seek to stamp out tribalism or whether to revive traditional Kingdoms & Chiefdoms. Museveni is an example of a Leftist who reversed course- much to Mamdani's disapproval. Still, it must be said, leaders who were the sons of Chieftains tended to do better than crazy Marxists or sociopathic Military officers.
I don't want to overinterpret Rushdie, or put ideas in his prose that he may not have
intended. In this controversy with the local British media (before The Satanic Verses sent
him into hiding), he claimed that he could not recognize the truth of his own experience
in the popular media representations of India.
Tariq Ali's 'Tandoori nights' was broadcast in 1985. It was shit. On the other hand, I easily recognised the truth of my own experiences in 'it aint half hot, Mum'.
The truth is, TV could reflect any shite well enough but at the end of the day it had to be entertaining.
Let us return to Conrad and to what I have been referring to as the second, less
imperialistically assertive possibility offered by Heart of Darkness. Recall once again
that Conrad sets the Story on the deck of a boat anchored in the Thames as Marlow tells
his story the sunsets, and by the end of the narrative the heart of darkness has reappeared
in England; outside the group of Marlow's listeners lies an undefined and unclear world.
Marlow went to meet Kurtz's fiancee. She wants to know what his last words were. Marlow says it was her name. Actually it was 'the horror, the horror!'. The narrator concludes that the great Seas that lie down river lead into the heart of an immense darkness. But this, as Hemingway saw, was a story about 'Men without women' or 'Commerce without Civilization' or 'Efficiency without Oikieosis'. The solution was to have married officers, accompanied by their wives, hold command. Women have a civilizing effect. Making money without making babies is indeed a horror and an abomination.
Conrad some times seems to want to fold that world into the imperial metropolitan
discourse represented by
Kipling in 'When William came'. The Madras famine is the backdrop for a marriage between a 'Punjab Civilian' and the sister of another such.
Marlow,
is a merchant seaman who had operated in waters where there were older, more senior, richer, Naval Captains who were purely African
but by virtue of his own dislocated subjectivity
He is an Englishman who hasn't done particularly well for himself. The suggestion is that his Aunty is of superior class. At any rate, it is she who gets him the Congo gig.
he resists the effort and succeeds in so doing, I have always believed, largely through formal devices.
i.e. being a bit stupid yet a keeper of the unwritten code. You don't tell a bloke's fiancee that he was paying hefty niggers to bugger him senseless. You pretend he was above that sort of thing.
Conrad's self-consciously circular narrative forms draw attention to themselves
as artificial constructions,
he was permitted this artifice because he was after all a furriner who had faithfully served in the British Merchant Marine. Still, he was a gloomy Gus. A lot of them furriners are you know. I think it's because they eat garlic.
encouraging us to sense the potential of a reality that seemed inaccessible to imperialism, just beyond its control, and that only well after Conrad's death in 1914
1924.
acquired a substantial presence.
No. Conrad lived to see the end of the great multi-ethnic Empires. Egypt, Afghanistan & Ireland became independent in 1922. Had Gandhi not unilaterally surrendered, the first Labour Govt. would have devised something cosmetic of that sort for India in 1924.
This needs more explanation. Despite their European names and mannerisms, Conrad's
narrators are not average unreflecting witnesses of European imperialism.
In Africa, they were its advance guard. They knew the Company they worked for might go bankrupt. If the Government takes it over, they become Civil Servants & will get pensions. That's what they really wanted.
They do not simply accept what goes on in the name of the imperial idea: they think about it a lot, they worry about it, they are actually quite anxious about whether they can make it seem like a routine thing.
Fuck that! They want financial security and the assured social position which comes from Government employment. Conrad, it must be said, got a Civil List pension.
But it never is.
If it works, it becomes so. That's how bureaucracies go about their business.
Conrad's way of demonstrating this discrepancy between the orthodox and his own views of empire is to keep drawing attention to how ideas and values are constructed (and deconstructed) through dislocations in the narrator's language.
Nonsense! None of the people involved have much in the way of ideas or values. They are cogs in a machine- nothing more.
In addition, the recitations are meticulously staged: the narrator is a speaker
whose audience and the reason for their being together, the quality of whose voice, the
effect of what he says-are all important and even insistent aspects of the story he tells.
Conrad was a friend of Casement. He knew there was a good story to be told. He doesn't do it very well but the effect is Jamesian.
Marlow, for example, is never straightforward. He alternates between garrulity and
stunning eloquence, and rarely resists making peculiar things seem more peculiar by
surprisingly misstating them, or rendering them vague and contradictory. Thus, he says, a
French warship fires "into a continent";
He means that the port in question doesn't have a fortress or Customs House etc. But the natives get the message. Their lack of fortifications & coastal artillery makes them all the more vulnerable. They need to do a deal to keep transacting business at that place.
Kurtz's eloquence is enlightening as well as fraudulent; and so on- his speech so full of these odd discrepancies (well discussed by Ian Wan as "delayed decoding") that the net effect is to leave his immediate audience as well as the reader with the acute sense that what he is presenting is not quite as it should be or appears to be.
The Narrator describes him as being like a Buddha. We understand that he isn't super-smart but at least he is smarter than the crazy Russian he meets. Briefly, Kurtz was a 'purchasing agent' who either by coercion, chicanery or charisma, sent back much more ivory than the Company had trade goods to pay for. This meant that a 'big bust' (i.e. collapsed supply chain) was in the offing. The trouble with robbing natives is that Russians or other such people might plausibly claim that they too had been robbed. In other words, either you have to pay off a host of such pests or risk your licence being cancelled.
Marlow buries the lead- viz. that Kurtz had put decapitated heads on the posts of his fence- but does so in a manner which adds verisimilitude-
“I am not disclosing any trade secrets.
This is commercial caution, not satire.
In fact, the manager said afterwards that Mr. Kurtz’s methods had ruined the district.
For the reason I had mentioned. Smart ivory suppliers would avoid the station. Trade goods would have to be bartered away at a discount.
I have no opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to understand that there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there.
Marlow isn't a lawyer or accountant or director of a company. But the people he was talking to where precisely these things. They know that for a trading station to flourish it should appeal to prudent men of business- not guys who like looking at severed heads.
They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence.
What might strike some Russian delinquent, or Marlow himself, as eloquence would not be recognised as any such thing by the City of London.
Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core....
Not of hollow men can enterprises- commercial or Colonial- be constructed. Marlow chooses to believe that the Manager has no moral objection to Kurtz's methods but merely feels that 'the time was not ripe' as if, when properly managed, the Trading Post will be ornamented with a more splendid profusion of heads on pikes. Marlow's audience knows better. You can do purchasing on a large scale 'on tick' provided there are discounting facilities- i.e. Lebanese or Indian traders who will supply some goods in return for a portion of the claim. Chopping off heads simply isn't good business practice anywhere or at any time.
Yet the whole point of what Kurtz and Marlow talk about is in fact imperial mastery,
No. Kurtz is a megalomaniac. His is a Satanic non serviam, not the creed of loyalty to the Emperor & the desire to extend its boundaries. The result is that he can serve nobody- not even himself. As for his great eloquence & visionary plans- what do they cash out as? Dale Carnegie's 'how to win friends & influence people'. 'You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability,’ he would say. ‘Of course you must take care of the motives—right motives—always.’
What is odd is that neither Marlow nor Kurtz dwell on race, colour, or the supposed backwardness of the Congolese people. There is the suggestion that they are desperate to appease a power they can't comprehend but it fails for the same reason Marlow's suggestion that Romans in Claudian Britain would have felt themselves to be marooned amongst savages- rather than a people greatly similar to the Gaulish soldiers who predominated numerically in the invading legions.
white European over black Africans, and their ivory, civilization over' the primitive dark
continent.
Kurtz couldn't marry his sweetheart because he didn't have enough money. That's why he had 'big plans'. At any rate, that is Marlow's charitable conclusion. What is appealing is that he keeps to the 'unwritten code'. Kurtz may or may not have been a man of talent. But he did want to be a success & people would prefer to have been associated with a success rather than a mediocrity like themselves. Had Kurtz gone to the Klondike & found gold, perhaps he'd have been a philanthropist and a bonus paterfamilias. He went into the heart of Africa without enough trading goods & did his Company a disservice by the manner in which he acquired fossil ivory. He gained not wealth but death & his legacy was horror.
By accentuating the discrepancy between the political idea of empire
i.e. the Emperor sending out a Viceroy who receives tribute from various indigenous princes & chieftains
and the remarkably disorienting actuality of Africa,
Something like this was implemented where fiscally viable. No great disorientation occurred save for those who went down with cerebral malaria.
Marlow unsettles the reader's sense not only of the very idea of empire, but of something more basic, reality itself.
No. There are no fairies at the bottom of the garden. Nor are we the dream of a ghost.
For if Conrad can show that all human activity depends on controlling a radically unstable reality to which words approximate only by will or convention,
He was a sailor. The Sea can be pretty fucking unstable. You can't control it by talking to it. But a good Captain can ride out the storm by saying things like 'shorten the mizzen boom!' or 'splice the mainbrace'.
the same is true of empire,
you can control the Imperial Army & Administration by issuing clear orders
of venerating the idea,
this can be done without words
and so forth.
With Conrad, then, we are in a world being made and unmade more or less all the time. What appears stable and secure--the policeman at the corner, for instance-
is completely stable and secure.
-is only slightly more secure than the white men in the jungle,
men in the jungle- black or white- are not secure unless that is where they habitually live or else they have sufficient armaments, equipment & training to make their way out of it.
and requires the same continuous (but precarious) triumph over an all-pervading darkness,
Fuck off! The Sun comes up every fucking day. There is the Moon and there are street lamps and torches and electric fucking lighting
which by the end of the tale is shown to be the same in London and in Africa.
Very true. The Queen, Gor bless 'er- had lots of decapitated heads planted atop the railings of Bucking Palace.
Conrad's genius allowed him to realize that the ever-present darkness could be colonized
or illuminated-
We illuminate darkness- i.e. turn the lights on. Said would try to colonise it. Sadly Darkness is populated by Zionists. They would beat and sodomize Said till he desisted and fucked off back to Yankee Doodle-land.
Heart of Darkness is full of references to the mission civilisatrice,
Because that is what King Leopold claimed to hold dear.
to benevolent as well as cruel schemes to bring light to the dark places and peoples of this
world by acts of will and deployments of power-
Trade. You give us ivory. We give you nice shiny things.
but that it also had to be acknowledged as independent.
No. You didn't have to acknowledge that the Mission to Civilize was independent and could choose to fuck off to the Andromeda Galaxy.
Kurtz and Marlow acknowledge the darkness,
Which is sin. Its wages is death.
the former as he is dying, the latter as he reflects retrospectively on the meaning of Kurtz's final words.
Which, in context, are clear enough. Kurtz gonna burn in Hell for sure!
They (and of course Conrad) are ahead of their time in understanding that what they call "the darkness" has an autonomy of its own, and can reinvade and reclaim what imperialism had taken for its own.
How fucking racist was Said? Is Nigeria becoming independent really a case of darkness triumphing?
Marlow and Kurtz are also creatures of their time
both could have taken service with the Emperor of Ethiopia or the Sultan of Zanzibar or some other such dusky potentate.
and cannot take the next step, which would be to recognize that what they saw, disablingly and disparagingly, as a non-European "darkness" was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence, and not, as Conrad reductively says, to reestablish the darkness.
He never says that. The question was whether pre-existing African polities could reorganize themselves the way the Japanese had done? This was an ideographic question. At one time it looked as though the Kabaka could knit together the Buganda the way the Ethiopian Negus had done. This would have had a 'mimetic' effect on Central Africa.
Conrad's tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that "natives" could lead lives free from European domination.
Nobody could conclude that. Even if the Europeans fucked off, the Egyptians or the Zanzibaris or whatever wouldn't have done.
As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom,
nor could he take it away from the black dudes who ruled Liberia & Sierra Leone & Ethiopia & Swaziland & so forth.
despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them.
None of his books feature an Imperial power. In the Congo, there was a commercial enterprise- not a fucking Viceroy.
The cultural and ideological evidence that Conrad was wrong in his Eurocentric way is
non-existent. Conrad was actually European. That is why he was European in his ways. Also, having had to give up the Sea because of his ill health, he actually lived in Europe for the greater part of his life.
both impressive and rich. A whole movement, literature, and theory of resistance and
response to empire exists-it is the subject of Chapter Three of this book-and in greatly
disparate post-colonial regions one sees tremendously energetic efforts to engage with the
metropolitan world in equal debate so as to testify to the diversity and differences of the
non-European world and to its own agendas, priorities, and history.
Why debate those you have thrown out or those who decided the game was not worth the candle? You don't see the Brits debating the Romans as part of their resistance to some fucking Caesar.
The purpose of this testimony is to inscribe, reinterpret, and expand the areas of engagement as well as the terrain contested with Europe.
That is not purpose. It is futility.
Some of this activity-for example, the work of two important and active Iranian
Iran was never a colony. It had its own Emperors till it became an Islamic Republic
intellectuals, Ali Sharia, i and Jalal Ali i-Ahmed, who by means of speeches, books, tapes, and pamphlets prepared the way for the Islamic Revolution interprets colonialism by asserting the absolute opposition of the native culture: the West is an enemy, a disease, an evil.
But the Shah wasn't from the West. He was Iranian.
What of Said? Was he the victim of Imperialism? No. True, there was a 'veiled protectorate' over Egypt from about 1882- and this is what enabled his family to prosper there till the 1952 riots- and, also true, Palestine was a League of Nations mandated territory entrusted to Britain between 1918-48, but it was British withdrawal which was the calamity for his people.
It seems it is Said, not Conrad, who hates darkies & who thinks only Europeans can rescue him from the horrors of the heart of darkness that is non-European rule.
