Edward Said getting wordy on Verdi

In a Chapter titled 'The Empire at Work- Verdi's Aida', Edward Said writes 

Consider Aida, Verdi's famous "Egyptian" opera.

Egypt was ruled by an Albanian dynasty which had broken away from the Ottoman Caliph. Verdi came from Italy parts of which were still held by the Hapsburg Emperor. Thankfully, the defeat of the French Emperor by the Prussians meant that the Papal States could join the Kingdom of Italy. My point is that when the Egyptian King commissions Verdi to write an Opera for him, what is triumphing is Nationalis over Imperialism. Said, being a stupid American- though his father was born as a subject of the Ottoman Caliph- thinks the anti-Imperialist, Nationalist, Verdi represented 'the Empire at Work'.  One may as well say that Said's book is 'the CIA at work' because Said is an American Citizen & the CIA 'centralizes American Intelligence'- or what passes for it.  

As a visual, musical, and theatrical spectacle, Aida does a great many things for and in European culture, one of which is to confirm the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant, and antique place in which Europeans can mount certain shows of force.

Fuck off! Aida is an Ethiopian princess who has been captured and enslaved. The context is Egypt's push southward through the Sudan to Ethiopia & the headwaters of the Nile. The Egypt-Ethiopia war was fought between 1874-6. The opera was first performed in Cairo in 1871. 

For the West, Aida is about ancient Empires- that of Egypt & Ethiopia & other such places where Moses or Abraham or other such Biblical personalities wandered around herding sheep or goats or camels or whatever. 

For Egyptians Aida is a romantic melodrama. In the 1942 film 'Aida' starring Umm Khulthum, Aida is the daughter of a talented tenant farmer. After his death, the feudal landlord becomes her guardian. But his own son falls in love with her. Can true love triumph over differences of class and caste? 

Concurrently with the composition of Aida, European "universal'' expositions routinely contained models of colonial villages, towns, courts, and the like; the malleability and transportability of secondary or lesser cultures was underlined.

So what? There were also models of ancient Roman or Egyptian or Celtic or Eskimo settlements. Said, racist cunt that he is, thinks anything not European is 'lesser' culture. 

These subaltern cultures

Winston Churchill was a subaltern. The word, in English, means 'second lieutenant'- i.e. it is the first rank held by one of the officer class.  

were exhibited before Westerners as microcosms of the larger imperial domain.

That was certainly true of Imperial Exhibitions. But it wasn't confined to colonies. There was a Japanese 'village' in Kensington, intended to boost exports of traditional handicrafts so as to help finance Japanese industrialization. This inspired 'The Mikado'- & with 'three little girls at school are we' the vast flood of Japanese school-girl porn which the internet has unleashed.

Little, if any, allowance was made for the non-European except within this framework. 

Fuck off! Gilbert & Sullivan didn't think Japan would become a colony. They did think there was something ludicrous about a distant island emulating English institutions. But within 15 years, the Royal Navy was pressing for an alliance with that island.  

Aida is synonymous with "grand opera" of the uniquely high nineteenth century type.

The French type but Italians & Germans developed it further in different directions. The Brits, thanks to WS Gilbert, infused it with wit & whimsy.  

Along with a very small group of others, it has survived for more than a century both as an immensely popular work and as one for which musicians, critics, and musicologists have a healthy respect. Yet Aida's grandeur and eminence, although evident to anyone who has seen or heard it, are complex matters about which all sorts of speculative theories exist, mostly about what connects Aida to its historical and cultural moment in the West.

It was commissioned by the Khedive, whose status had been recognised by the Caliph in 1867, who hoped to be greatly enriched by the Suez Canal & was planning to secure Sudan & a route to the headwaters of the Nile. This is still an important feature of Egyptian foreign policy & represents a big problem for Ethiopia.  

In Opera: The Extravagant Art, Herbert Lindenberger puts forward the imaginative theory that Aida, Boris Godunov, and GOtterdammerung are operas of 187o, tied respectively to archeology, nationalist historiography, and philology.

Aida was paid for by the Khedive to promote Egypt's 'material' interests. Suez & the headwaters of the Nile remain crucial to that country.  

Wieland Wagner, who produced Aida at Berlin in 1962, treats the opera, in his words, as "an African mystery."

Because he had shit for brains. It is about Egypt's claim to a special role with respect to the Nile's headwaters.  

... Whereas it had been Italy and Italians (with special force, paradoxically enough, in Nabucco) who were addressed in Verdi's earlier operas, despite the often exotic or outre subject matter, in Aida it was Egypt and Egyptians of early antiquity, a far remoter and less engaging phenomenon than Verdi had ever set to music.

Verdi wasn't stupid. There were plenty of Italians in Egypt. They knew the dynasty was foreign (Albanian) a were most of the Pashas (feudal landlords). The indigenous fellaheen were getting nothing. Like the contadino, the authentic Egyptian was the descendant of great Emperors & a sublime civilization but earned their bread hewing wood & drawing water for 'barbarian' masters. 

Not that Aida wants for his customary political noisiness, for surely Act II, scene 2 (the so-called Triumphal scene) is the biggest thing Verdi wrote for the stage, a virtual jamboree of everything an opera house can collect and parade.

It's what the Khedive wanted. He thought he was the cat's whiskers. First Sudan, then Ethiopia, then Uganda- who knows how large his Empire would eventually become? Sadly, he ran out of cash & his French & English creditors imposed a 'Veiled Protectorate' which he had to accept because the alternative was an Arab revolt.  

But Aida is self-limiting, atypically held in, and there is no record of any participatory enthusiasm connected with it, even though at New York's Metropolitan Opera, for instance, it has been performed more times than any other work.

Verdi did what was asked of him because he was well paid to do so. But he didn't really care if some Albanian or Circassian parasite, who had bought himself a title, styled himself as Magnifico or Fantastico or Biggest Dickico. The dude would soon get his comeuppance for saying 'my country is no longer only in Africa; we are now part of Europe, too. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions'. The Brits got the Caliph to rescind his title. His son became Britain's puppet. Ismail himself died in Istanbul- which is in Europe, but which is Islamic. 

Verdi's other works that dealt with remote or alien cultures did not inhibit his audiences from identifying with them anyway, and, like the earlier operas, Aida is about a tenor and a soprano who want to make love but are prevented by a baritone and a mezzo. What are the differences in Aida. and why did Verdi's habitual mix produce so unusual a blend of masterly competence and affective neutrality?

The Egyptians got Verdi right. It was poor girl loves rich boy. Will Daddy permit them to get hitched? This is a popular plot in Bollywood musicals. The Egyptians are a bit more artistic & refined- i.e. no vulgar dance numbers- but an Indian can watch 'Nawara' happily enough though it only features instrumental tracks.  

The circumstances of Aida's first production and under which it was written are unique in Verdi's career. The political and certainly the cultural setting in which Verdi worked between early 1870 and late 1871 included not only Italy, but imperial Europe

France lost its Emperor. Europe was becoming less Imperial. The new Kaiser was 'Emperor in, not of, Germany'.  

and viceregal Egypt, an Egypt technically within the 'Ottoman Empire but now gradually being established as a dependent and subsidiary part of Europe.

No. It first moved in an independent direction but then ran out of money. Also, the indigenous Arabs were unhappy. 

Aida's peculiarities--its subject matter and setting, its monumental grandeur, its strangely unaffecting visual and musical effects, its overdeveloped music and constricted domestic situation, its eccentric place in Verdi's career- require what I have been calling a contrapuntal interpretation,

Rather than the true explanation which was economic. Verdi was paid to produce something state of the art but with an Eastern setting. Is the 'liebestod' (love-in-death) finale unaffecting? No. Egypt has its own Sufi or 'hubb al Udhri' tradition. Aida dies of her own volition for such is the fate of the Udhri.  The 'tomb within the tomb' is the final 'barzakh' uniting, as their common limit, Eros & Thanatos- Love & Death. Don't forget Wagner was influenced by Schopenhauer who was influenced by the Vedantic tradition as translated by Dara Shikoh- a Sufi.                            

assimilable neither to the standard view of Italian opera

The standard view is that it's fucking great, mate. The triumphal march from Aida is used by many football club supporters in Italy. The Scots, with greater discernment, adopted 'Yes Sir. I can boogie.' 

nor more generally to prevailing views of the great masterpieces of nineteenth-century European civilization.

The prevailing view is that they were boring shite.  

Aida, like the opera form itself, is a hybrid, radically impure work that belongs equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination.

Nonsense! India was dominated by the Brits. We didn't have no fucking Opera. On the other hand, the Afro-American Jubilee singers were a big hit.  

It is a composite work,

No. It is the work of an accomplished auteur. Verdi even got a special type of trumpet created.  

built around disparities and discrepancies

There are no such things. Said could play the piano. He thought this made him a fucking musicologist.  

that have been either ignored or unexplored,

because they are stupid shite 

that can be recalled and mapped descriptively;

by a shithead 

they are interesting in and of themselves, and they make more sense of Aida's unevenness,

wholly a product of the difficulties of staging. The music isn't uneven at all.  

its anomalies, its restrictions and silences, than analyses of the kind that focus on Italy and European culture exclusively.

Did Verdi produce something which incorporated all the latest trends in Grand Opera? Yes. He did what he was paid to do.  

I shall put before the reader material that paradoxically cannot be overlooked but systematically has been.

That material is shit Said pulled out of his ass.  

This is mostly because the embarrassment of Aida is finally that it is not so much about but of imperial domination.

It is neither. The Khedive wanted to create a big African Empire. This seemed feasible. The problem was money & growing disaffection on the part of the indigenous Arab population.  

 Similarities with Jane Austen's work

Not to mention Grimm's fairy tales 

-equally improbable as being involved with empire-

Austen wasn't involved with 'Empire'. One or two characters make money from West Indian estates or East Indian bounties. But, for the most part, Incomes are derived from rents on agricultural estates. Colonies could be lost at any moment. Fleets could be sunk. Even Consols might be repudiated if Napoleon won. That is why, rents on land were the safest investment. 

-will emerge. If one interprets Aida from that perspective, aware that the opera was written for and first produced in an African country

a Mediterrannean country which had been ruled by Greeks & Romans and which was ruled by a dynasty of Albanian descent. 

with which Verdi had no connection,

Did you know Nebuchadnezzar was actually a Milanese gentleman? He and Verdi's grandfather went into the Olive Oil business together. 

a number of new features will stand out. Verdi himself says something to this effect in a letter that inaugurates his as yet almost completely latent connection with an Egyptian opera. Writing to Camille du Lode

a friend of the Egyptologist who outlined the story or 'scenario' for Aida 

, a close friend who had just returned from a voyage en Orient, Verdi remarks on February 19, 1868: "When we see each other, you must-describe all the events of your voyage: the wonders you have seen, and the beauty and ugliness of a country which once had a greatness and a civilization I had never been able to admire."

A common enough sentiment.  Egypt represented despotism. Rome & Athens had started off as Republics. 

On November 1, 1869, the inauguration of the Cairo Opera House was a brilliant event during celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal; Rigoletto was the opera performed. A few weeks before, Verdi had turned down Khedive Ismail's offer to write a hymn for the occasion, and in December he wrote du Lode a long letter on the dangers of "patchwork" operas: "I want art in any of its manifestations, not the arrangement, the artifice, and the system that you prefer," he said, arguing that for his part he wanted "unified" works, in which "the idea is ONE, and everything must converge to form this ONE."

In other words Verdi was yielding to the influence of Wagner. My own feeling is that the genius of sunny Italy or even sunnier India is for something more variegated. Thrill, Spills, Comedy, Tragedy, & poor girl marrying the rich boy & fucking the brains out of that milksop.  

Said admits that, apart from the money,

 ...Verdi saw a chance to create a work whose every detail he could supervise from beginning sketch to opening  night. In addition, he was to be supported in this enterprise by royalty: indeed, du Lode suggested that the Viceroy not only desperately wanted the piece for himself, but also had helped Mariette in writing it.

In other words, he'd get paid. But Verdi also wanted the thing to be 'best in class'. That is what he delivered.  

... Egypt's submissive or at least indifferent presence in his life allowed him to pursue his artistic intentions with what appeared to be an uncompromising intensity.

Egypt was irrelevant just as Iraq was irrelevant to Nabucco. Aida was set in the distant past.  

But I believe Verdi fatally confused this complex and in the end collaborative capacity to bring a distant operatic fable to life with the Romantic ideal of an organically integrated, seamless work of art, informed only by the aesthetic intention of a single creator.

Romantic & Romance are words which come from Rome- whose language was Latin. Romantic literature subsists by transfusions from the Classical world. Organically integrated & seamless just means that the ballet is detached from the rest of the Opera. In France, the aristocratic members of the Jockey Club wanted the ballet to always be in the Second Act because it was their brutal custom to skip the first act & then fuck the sweaty ballerinas after the Second Act. After that, they went to the Casino. Wagner had to withdraw Tannhauser, where the ballet is in the first Act, because of the ruckus created by the aristocrats.  

My point is that this business of a Gesamtkunstwerk- a total art work- with a single auteur was a way to rid Opera of the undue influence of drunken lechers. If this hadn't been done Grand Opera would have swiftly degenerated into burlesque. 

Thus an imperial notion of the artist 

Represented by the Court composer or Master of Revels or whatever 

dovetailed conveniently with an imperial notion of a non-European world whose claims on the European composer were either minimal or nonexistent.

Nonsense! Verdi, Wagner etc. catered to the bildungsburgertum/ beamte class as well as the commercial bourgeoisie & urban professional classes. They, like Kings, wanted to diminish the influence of the drunken, philistine, Aristocracy. Ultimately, the hope was, ballerinas might not be prostitutes whose protectors, as in Balzac's novels, hire claques to ensure their success or, rather, the failure of their rival. 

To Verdi the conjunction must have seemed to be eminently worth nursing along.

No. Cairo was far away. He wanted his Operas to be put on in European Cities with good ports or railway connections. America too was becoming important.  

Said sees some special significance in the fact that the scenario for Aida was by a French Egyptologist. The fact is the Khedive was Francophone & Auguste Mariette was his pampered protege. 

The difference is that Verdi could and indeed, for the first time in European opera, did avail himself of Egyptology's historical vision and academic authority.

The first Opera set in Egypt had a scenario conceived by an Egyptologist working closely with the Khedive. Since no other Egyptologist was able to commission an opera, Aida is unique in that respect. So what? 

This science was embodied at close hand for Verdi in the person of Auguste Mariette, whose French nationality and training were part of a crucial imperial genealogy.

No. Ismail had been sent to France to keep him out of the way. That's why he liked the French and brought some French people to Egypt once he became Khedive. The question was whether France would stand by him in his tussle with the Caliph. It wouldn't & then it went & lost a war against the Prussians. The Khedive's days were numbered. 

Verdi perhaps had no way of knowing much in detail about Mariette,

Everything that needed to be known was known to Verdi. He really was a pal of the Khedive. Obviously, so long as French troops were in the Papal States, an Italian patriot might want to keep a distance from a French ally. But after 1867, this scruple would weaken.  

but he was strongly impressed by Mariette's initial scenario and recognized a qualified expert whose competence could represent ancient Egypt with a legitimate credibility.

Nobody gave a fuck. Egyptology was in its infancy. Still, it is true that 'Abbot & Costello meet the Mummy' was based on a scenario written by Lord Carnarvon. Did you know 'Costello' in ancient Egypt means 'Ka's tower of shit'? American audiences back then were sticklers for attention to detail.  

The simple point to be made here is that Egyptology is Egyptology and not Egypt.

& 'Orientalism' is Saidian shite. It has nothing to do with anything at all.  

Mariette was made possible by two important predecessors, both French,

his cousin- a painter like himself- and his cousin's pal Champollion, a child prodigy, who deciphered hieroglyphics. Mariette got his start when he inherited his cousin's papers.  

both imperial, both reconstructive,

Not imperial. Initially amateurish & entrepreneurial before gaining a limited amount of Government support in the context of a putative Franco-Egyptian alliance.  

and, if I can use a word that I shall borrow from Northrop Frye, both presentational: the first is the archeological volumes of Napoleon's Description de J'Egypte; and the second is Champollion's deciphering of hieroglyphics presented in 1822 in his Lettre a M. Dacier and in 18z4 in his Precis du systeme hieroglyphique.

Napoleon's Imperialism failed in Egypt. It never became a colony. Still, there was a 'veiled protectorate' from the 1880s onwards till about 1922.  

By "presentational" and "reconstructive" I mean a number of characteristics that seemed tailormade for Verdi: Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt was motivated by a desire to capture Egypt, to threaten the British, to demonstrate French power; but Napoleon and his scholarly experts were there also to put Egypt before Europe, in a sense to stage its antiquity, its wealth of associations, cultural importance, and unique aura for a European audience.

But the Jesuits had 'staged' China in the late seventeenth Century and then Sir William Jones had 'staged' India & Persia & so on and so forth. Napoleon needed money to stay in Egypt & thus made out that all sorts of treasures were discoverable there. Sadly, Nelson fucked up his fleet & so he had to return to France with his tail between his legs.  

Yet this could not be done without an aesthetic as well as a political intention. What Napoleon and his teams found was an Egypt whose antique dimensions were screened by the Muslim, Arab, and even Ottoman presence standing everywhere between the invading French army and ancient Egypt. How was one . to get to that other, older, and more prestigious part?

Digging. Maybe they would find lots of gold.  

Here began the particularly French aspect of Egyptology,

Stupidity. The Brits figured out a way to make money out of learning Sanskrit & Arabic & Persian & so forth. The fact is, if your judges know the personal law of Muslims & Hindus & so forth, then your Courts attract more & more business. Smart merchants shift to your jurisdiction. They lend you money to hire mercs to defeat neighbouring Princes- if they are shit- and thus expand the tax base. The French were too stupid & parochial to understand this.  

which continued in the work of Champollion and Mariette. Egypt had to be reconstructed in models or drawings, whose scale, projective grandeur (I say "projective" because as you leaf through the Description you know that what you are looking at are drawings, diagrams, paintings of dusty, decrepit, and neglected pharaonic sites looking ideal and splendid as if there were no modern Egyptians but only European spectators), and exotic distance were truly unprecedented.

Nope. Thomas and William Daniell had emigrated to Calcutta around 1785 & started publishing by the end of the decade. They prepared several volumes of 'Oriental Scenery' & made good money. The French, it must be said, were ahead artistically, but were slower to tap the market.  

The reproductions of the Description therefore are not descriptions but ascriptions.

they are also prescriptions for suppositories which Said should stick up his arse. Start with Cleopatra's Needle & work your way towards the Grand Pyramid.  

First the temples and palaces were reproduced in an orientation and perspective that staged the actuality of ancient Egypt as reflected through the imperial eye;

Because painters are actually soldiers. Did you know that Genghis Khan was an acclaimed water-colourist?  

then-since all of them were empty or lifeless--in the words of Ampere, they had to be made to speak, and hence the efficacy of Champollion's decipherment;

It was useful because it provided information to historians. Ultimately, it gave 'historicity' to the Old Testament & thus contributed to 'the higher Criticism'.  

then, finally, they could be dislodged from their context and transported to Europe for use there.

Also, when White Man takes your picture, he captures your soul. Charlie Hebdo produced a cartoon of the Prophet. This shows Whiteys have taken over Islam. All these so called Ayatollahs are actually smelly French dudes.  

This, as we shall see, was Mariette's contribution. This continuous process went on roughly from 1798 until the 1860s, and it is French.

Sadly, it was the Brits who became top-dog in Egypt.  

Unlike England, which had India,

thanks to which it would also become hegemonic in Iraq, parts of Iran, the Gulf, Aden, Sudan, Uganda etc, etc 

and Germany, which, at a remove, had the organized learning that went with Persia and India,

Hanover was in personal union with England. That's why some of its savants got into Sanskrit & Persian & so forth. The habit spread. 

France had this rather imaginative and enterprising field in which, as Raymond Schwab

a know nothing belles lettrist 

says in The Oriental Renaissance, scholars "from Rouge to Mariette at the end of the line [started by Champollion's work] ... were ... explorers with isolated careers who learned everything on their own."

They were poor but enterprising.  

The Napoleonic savants

like the Jesuits 

were explorers who learned everything on their own,

Which is why they were called explorers, not researchers.  

since there was no body of organized, truly modern and scientific knowledge about Egypt on which they could draw.

Nor was there any such thing regarding France's pre-Roman past 

As Martin Bernal

White dude. Us darkies like him because he suggests that all them smart Greek & Roman dudes were probably from Nigeria or Tamil Nadu 

has characterized  it, although the prestige of Egypt throughout the eighteenth century was considerable, it was associated with esoteric and mystifying currents like Masonry.

From about 1780 you had Cagliostro & Egyptian Freemasonry 

Champollion and Mariette were eccentrics and autodidacts,

they were poor. Champollion got in trouble with the Ultras because he was trying to spread education through the 'pupil-teacher' method. We would regard him as a prodigy & a patriot- not an eccentric.  

but they were moved by scientific and rationalistic energies.

They were intelligent & enterprising. Champollion saw that Coptic is descended from ancient Egypt. In other words, he was for the indigenous people, not foreign dynasties.  

The meaning of this in the ideological terms of Egypt's presentation in French archaeology is that Egypt could be described "as the first and essential oriental influence on the West,"

That's what the Greeks had said. But, obviously, it was the Jews who were the biggest influence. 

a claim that Schwab quite rightly regards as false, since it ignores Orientalist work done by European scholars on, other parts of the ancient world.

Said is obsessed with European scholars. He himself studied European texts. But he did not have sufficient emic  'background knowledge' to understand what he was reading. 

The French had sought 'soft-power' in Egypt. They failed. The Brits took over the place after 1882. This also meant that British Egyptology supplanted French efforts in that field. Now, of course, Egypt has itself taken charge of making its ancient history intelligible and illuminating for the whole of Humanity.

What, au fond, is Said's 'contrapuntal' interpretation of Aida? The French had once dreamed of an Empire in Egypt but they failed. Some guys got jobs working for the Khedive. Could Egypt become an Imperial power in Africa in alliance with France? No. The Brits were stronger and had superior finances. They became paramount in Egypt and the Sudan. In 1898 there was a showdown with the French in Fashoda. England then offered Germany an alliance which it foolishly refused. Thus England allied with Japan. After Japan defeated the Russians, the Russians & the French needed England's naval supremacy while they sought to rearm sufficiently to take on the Germans & Austro-Hungarians. In effect, this meant the end of the European Imperial project. Aida's 'Triumphal March' was for the countries of Asia & Africa who would were free to rise up in the manner of Japan- unless they were too lazy or stupid or corrupt to do so. 

Said takes a different view. 

         In short, Aida quite precisely recalls the enabling circumstances of its commission and composition,

The Khedive thought he would get rich from the Canal & conquer more & more of the Sudan & Ethiopia & so forth.  

and, like an echo to an original sound, conforms to aspects of the contemporary context it works so hard to exclude.

Echoes don't do anything of the sort. Productions of Aida  may or may not seek to exclude 'the contemporary context'.  

As a highly specialized form of aesthetic memory,

it is an aesthetic production not a memory. Unless some impresario says he is recreating the first performance, 'aesthetic memory' is irrelevant. Even then, everybody would have a different one.  

Aida embodies, as it was intended to do, the authority of Europe's version of Egypt

no such thing had any fucking authority. There was a bit of amateur Egyptology here and there but it was concerned with shite that happened 4000 years ago.  

at a moment in its nineteenth-century history, a history for which Cairo in the years I869 I87I was an extraordinarily suitable site.

A place near the Pyramids is a suitable side for an opera about ancient Egypt. Said is a friggin genius! 

A full contrapuntal appreciation of Aida reveals a structure of reference and attitude, a web of affiliations, connections, decisions, and collaborations, which can be read

by a shithead 

as leaving a set of ghostly notations in the opera's visual and musical text. Consider the story: an Egyptian army defeats an Ethiopian force, but the young Egyptian hero of the campaign is impugned as a traitor, sentenced to death, and dies by asphyxiation. This episode of antiquarian inter-African rivalry acquires considerable resonance when one reads it against the background of Anglo-Egyptian rivalry in East Africa from the 1840s till the 186Os.

The problem was that the Arabs of Egypt were not interested in it. Nor were the Arabs of the Levant- Said's own ancestors. So this was a story about an Albanian usurper & his progeny seeking Empire over Arabs & Africans. But this harmed the Caliph & could endanger British interests. Still, if the Khedive hadn't wasted money on useless shite- like building a fucking Opera House- he may have prevailed. 

This is a story about economics. But then Opera too is a story about economics. It isn't a story about Knowledge-as-Power-as-Paranoid-Grievance-Studies shite. Still, there can be little doubt that Said's brains were buggered to buggery by 'the Occidental gaze'.  

The British regarded Egyptian objectives there under Khedive Ismail~ who was eager to expand southward, as a threat to their Red Sea hegemony, and the safety of their route to India; nevertheless, prudently shifting policy, the British encouraged Ismail's moves in East Africa as a way of blocking French and Italian ambitions in Somalia and Ethiopia.

The Brits backed winners. Could the Khedive be a winner? No. He was a shithead who squandered money on Opera houses.  

By the early 187Os the change was completed, and by 1882. Britain occupied Egypt entirely.

Because Urabi Pasha- of indigenous peasant origin- had mutinied against the Khedive & his Anglo-French backers.  

From the French point of view, incorporated by Mariette, Aida dramatized the dangers of a successful Egyptian policy of force in Ethiopia, especially since Ismail himself-as Ottoman Viceroy-was interested in such ventures as a way of achieving more independence from Istanbul.

If the Khedive was successful, in the South and had been checked when trying to expand to his East, he would look to his own West- i.e. Libya, Tunisia &.... French Algeria.  

There is more than that in Aida's simplicity and severity, especially since so much about the opera, and the Opera House, which was built to house Verdi's work, concerns Ismail himself and his reign

No. Aida came out before the Khedive went bankrupt. The Ethiopians had kicked his ass at Gundet & Gura

. A fair amount of work

by shithead academics 

has been done recently on the economic and political history of European involvement in Egypt during the eighty years after Napoleon's expedition; much of this concurs with the position taken by Egyptian nationalist historians (Sabry; Rafi', Ghorbal) that the viceregal heirs who composed Mohammad Ali's dynasty, in a descending order of merit (with the exception of the intransigent Abbas),

who wanted to side with the Ottoman Caliph.  

involved Egypt ever more deeply in what has been called the "world economy"

i.e. they borrowed and wasted a lot of money 

but more accurately was the loose agglomeration of European financiers, merchant bankers, loan corporations, and commercial adventures. This led ineluctably to the British occupation of 1882.,

Nope it led to a military revolt by a peasant origin officer  

and, just as ineluctably, to the eventual reclamation of the Suez Canal by Gamal Abdel Nasser

also peasant origin. The dynasty had been deposed in 1952 which was also when the Said family lost their wealth and family business. Soon, they themselves would have to leave. It wasn't Jews, but Egyptians, who rendered them exiles.  Said's oeuvre seeks to hide this shameful truth. 

Said on Conrad- part 2

In his book 'Culture & Imperialism', Edward Said wrote-  

Conrad is the precursor of the Western views of the Third World

Western views, like Eastern views, were and are shaped by newspapers, newsreels, magazine articles and, to a lesser extent, popular fiction & light entertainment.  The term "third world" was coined by a  French anthropologist Alfred Sauvy in 1952. It referred to the growth of a non-aligned group of countries- some of which were ex-colonies or territories soon to become independent- in the context of the Cold War- something not envisaged in Conrad's fiction. 

One might say that Kipling's Kim- showing Afghans & Bengalis & British officers cooperating against a Russian threat- was a precursor of 'great game' Cold War espionage with a backdrop of vast deserts or forests or mountains. Conrad's 'the Secret Agent' could be seen as a precursor to the Counter-intelligence novel set in the dingier districts of the metropole. What was lacking in either was the notion that the first and second 'Worlds' would find it worthwhile to offer Aid, rather than exact tribute, from the countries of Asia, Africa, or- stretching things a little- Latin America. 

I suppose real world developments in the run-up to the Great War were reflected in John Buchan's novels & Maugham's Ashenden stories which highlight the need to combat an enemy Superpower's foreign network of secret agents who coordinate seemingly spontaneous 'indigenous' uprisings for some sinister purpose. Maugham was an intelligence operative during the Great War. In the interwar years, there was in fact a Comintern conspiracy as well as 'White' networks seeking to undermine the Soviet Union and to combat the influence of its sympathizers and fellow travellers. The outbreak of the Second World War meant that the previously isolationist United States started to acquire considerable knowledge of different theatres- India, Indo-China, the MENA etc- but the approach to knowledge acquisition involved statistical analysis & strategies based on 'Structural Causal Models'. The people doing this did not draw upon stereotypes in popular fiction or the manner in which they were modified in texts of a more self-consciously literary or 'modernist' type. However, some money was spent on tracking the views of indigenous intelligentsias. But this was an exercise in Sociology & Political Science. It had nothing to do with reading Conrad to understand Congo or reading Joyce so as to glean insights into the aetiology of the decline of leprechaun influence within the ranks of Sinn Fein. 

which one finds in the work of novelists as different as Graham Greene,

Greene was profoundly influenced by Conrad, who died five years before Greene's first novel was published, though he had no 'views on the Third World'. Conrad may have started off with the belief that Whites would inevitably rule over Darkies. Then, in 1905, Japan defeated Russia. Britain had ended its 'splendid isolation' by allying with Japan 3 years earlier. Why? The Royal Navy was overstretched. During the Great War, Japan had taken over a lot of the functions of the Royal Navy- even in the Mediterranean. Conrad, as a sailor, knew that if the 'West' lost naval hegemony, then there could be no Imperialism in Africa or Asia. Greene took this as axiomatic. He has zero interest in preserving a zombie Empire. 

By the time Conrad died, Egypt, Ireland & Afghanistan were independent. Would the Labour Party (which had come to power in 1924) honour its manifesto commitment re. India? No. Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered two years previously. Indian politicians had participated in the General Election & taken their seats in the Legislature.  The Brits would dictate the pace & scope of the transfer of power because Indians could not agree among themselves. The same problem reappeared in the Arab lands. Africa too needed a further spell of 'State-building' before tribal loyalties were replaced by something more favourable to national self-determination.

 The League of Nations had made it clear that the eventual goal was full independence for all territory taken from defeated Empires. The Colonial powers held temporary 'mandates'- nothing more. Imperialism was dead in the water because the age of Emperors had passed, never to return- though the Japs may have thought differently for a few years before being nuked into submission. 

V. S. Naipaul,

whose politics were the opposite of Greene's. He liked Thatcher, Greene hated her. Naipaul's attitude to the Third World is like that of Nirad Chaudhuri. However, as a novelist, he was influenced by Conrad because his themes were social isolation, disillusionment & the fact that everything had gone to the dogs or wogs or whatever. 

and Robert Stone,

a light weight.  

of theoreticians of imperialism like Hannah Arendt,

not a theoretician. She knew nothing of the subject & was, in any case, as stupid as shit.  

and of travel writers, filmmakers, and polemicists whose specialty is to deliver the non-European world either for analysis and judgement or for satisfying the exotic tastes of European and North American audiences.

Brothels & opium dens? Neither feature in Conrad. He was a sailor at a time when the Brits were still very interested in the Sea.  

For if it is true that Conrad ironically sees the imperialism of the San Tome silver mine's British and American owners as ·doomed by its own pretentious and impossible ambitions,

Nonsense! The country has been independent for three generations. The mine-owner is of English descent and supports the current Dictator. Sadly, there is the danger of a military coup conducted by some other General. It may lead to the secession of one or more Province.  The mine-owner plans to ship away all the silver and blow up the mine so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. This shows he was a deeply silly man. Conrad had sufficient literary artistry to make the character credible- at least to such of his readers as neither knew, nor cared, about how business is actually conducted. 

it is also true that he writes as a man whose Western view of the non-Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations.

The mine-owner may be of English descent but he is a citizen of an independent Republic. Is Colombia 'Western' or not? Its elite looked & acted like 'pure blooded' gentlemen. Some may have had some 'native' blood- but this was also true of members of the British aristocracy. The current Prince of Wales had an Indian maternal ancestor from about five or six generations ago. On the other hand, he is also descended from Count Dracula- which is super cool. 

All Conrad can see is a world totally dominated by the Atlantic West,

He can't see that because he was actually there and it wasn't. The place was politically unstable because its people were volatile. I suppose you could say the secession of Panama had something to do with the US but that isn't Conrad's theme.  

in which every opposition to the West only confirms the West's wicked power.

Either the place is part of the West or the West was absent from that place. The Spanish had been thrown out three or four generations previously.  

What Conrad cannot see is an alternative to this cruel tautology.

Like what? The country deciding to stop being Hispanic and start being Tibetan? 

He could neither understand that India, Africa, and South America also had lives and cultures with integrities not totally controlled by the gringo imperialists

There are no gringo imperialists in Conrad. On the other hand, it is true that Viceroy Curzon was actually Billy the Kid. The Kabaka of Buganda, on the other hand, was Annie Oakley. Said's father was brutally raped by Doc Holliday- Sheriff of Jerusalem- and was impressed into the American army to go conquer Germany for the gringos.  

and reformers of this world, nor allow himself to believe that anti-imperialist independence movements were not all corrupt and in the pay of the puppet masters in London or Washington.

There was some German money available for the Indian Independence movement at a later date. Washington, at that time, was small and provincial. The Federal budget was paltry. The American Foreign Service was only created in 1924.

As for London, it didn't want 'independence movements' anywhere- even the Continent- because of Balance of Power concerns. 

Said is an utterly ignorant shithead.  

These crucial limitations in vision are as much a part of Nostromo as its characters and plot.

Nostromo is a working class Italian immigrant. We wonder whether he might not have achieved great things in a more egalitarian setup. Conrad disillusions us. The guy is just as much a crook as the aristos.  

Conrad's novel embodies the same paternalistic arrogance of imperialism that it mocks in characters like Gould and Holroyd.

Holroyd is not paternal. He is distant- a calculating machine. Gould is a romantic idealist but understands that the country will only prosper if 'material interests' dictate policy- not paranoid notions of returning to the purity of some previous revolution or the other. Neither are 'imperialist'. There is no point fighting rebels or bandits in the interior. You can always do a deal with whichever revolutionary or liberal or conservative shithead happens to grab in power. 

Conrad seems to be saying, "We Westerners will decide who is a good native or a bad, because all natives. have sufficient existence by virtue of our recognition. We created them, we taught them to speak and think, and when they rebel they simply confirm our views of them as silly children, duped by some of their Western masters."

If this were the case, Conrad could point to a good or a bad native. But he doesn't do so. Gould was born in the country. Is he a native? Nostromo is an Italian expat. Is the good? No. Is the story any good? Not really. The thing is silly. Businessmen should hedge risks. They shouldn't do stupid shit- e.g. think of blowing up a mine or trust some I-talian dude with a shitload of Silver. Conrad gets away with this shite because maybe he is being philosophical or psychological in some profound manner connected to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or some other such unclean Continental poof, poseur or pervert. 

This is in effect' what Americans have felt about their southern neighbors: that independence is to be wished for them so long as it is the kind of independence we approve of.

It is what everybody feels about their wishes for everybody else. We hope they get what they want provided it is the sort of thing we approve of.  

Anything else 'is unacceptable and, worse, unthinkable.

Says a guy who can't fucking think because he studied and taught worthless shite.  

It is no paradox, therefore, that Conrad was both anti-imperialist and imperialist,

as well as being a cat and a dog and a golliwog 

progressive when it came to rendering fearlessly and pessimistically the self-confirming, self-deluding corruption of overseas domination, deeply reactionary when it came to conceding that Africa or South America could ever have had an independent history or culture, which the imperialists violently· disturbed but by which they were ultimately defeated.

Conrad, like Greene, preferred the backdrop to be seedy, if not shitty, so as dwell upon the seediness, or shittiness, of the protagonist.  

Yet lest we think patronizingly of Conrad as the creature of his own time, we had better note that recent attitudes in Washington and. among most Western policymakers and intellectuals show little advance over his views.

The good thing about America is that Washington & 'intellectuals' don't matter. Will the Hunt brothers corner the silver market? Would this entail some privately funded shenanigans in a key 'swing' silver producing country? That's the sort of thing smart people make good money finding out. 'Material interests' do matter. In between saying 'boo to Fascism!' or 'Fuck you, Whitey!' we have bills to pay.  

What Conrad discerned as the futility latent in imperialist philanthropy

because if London sends wheat to starving Ireland or rice to starving Bengal, that would be totes futile right?  

- whose intentions include such ideas as "making the world safe for democracy''-

Like defeating Hitler? That was futile- right? The French would have preferred being ruled by the Gestapo.  

the United States government is still unable to perceive, as it tries to  implement its wishes all over the globe, especially in the Middle East.

Clinton should have let Israel ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. He was wrong to try to make them give up East Jerusalem & the West Bank.  

At least Conrad had the courage to see that no such schemes ever succeed

The Brits won the Boer War & gained much profit & geopolitical advantage from the place for the next sixty years.  

because they trap the planners in more illusions of omnipotence and misleading self-satisfaction (as in Vietnam),

if you have a stupid plan you do stupid shit till the cost becomes unbearable.  

and because by their very nature they falsify the evidence.

You can't falsify a fiscal deficit.  

All this is worth bearing in mind if Nostromo is to be read with some attention to its massive strengths and inherent limitations.

It is a novel which people at the time thought rather good.  

The newly independent state of Sulaco that emerges at the end of the novel is only a smaller, more tightly controlled and intolerant version of the larger state from which it has seceded and has now come to displace in wealth and importance.

This could be said of the Dutch Republic or, indeed, the United States. But why bother saying it? You may say, 'but disabled Lesbians of colour did not marry goats in either Amsterdam or New York! Is that not a fundamental betrayal of some shite or the other?'  But, the riposte is that the scotomization of the catachresis of sodomized subalterns in Singur re-problematises the merging of hermeneutic horizons posited by the very deconstruction of the catachresis of its own mise en abyme as differance.  Either that or the other way round. 

Conrad allows the reader to see that imperialism is a system.

British readers knew that Imperialism was the system overseen by the Secretary of State for India & the Colonial Office. Conrad had nothing to do with either.  

Life in one subordinate realm of experience is imprinted by the fictions and follies of the dominant realm.

Nonsense! Writers about the Empire- Kipling, Buchan etc- showed that there was only a very tenuous connection between the two. Conrad too shows that stuff believed by blue-stockings in London or New York, bore no relation to reality anywhere. Similarly, Said's vapourings were unconnected to anything happening on the 'Arab street'. The exception was his 'faux bond' with Derrida which led directly to the third Intifada.  

But the reverse is true, too, as experience in the dominant society comes to depend uncritically on natives and their territories perceived as in need of Ia mission civiJisatn'ce.

Very true. Oscar Wilde's experience of the rectum of a Cockney rent-boy depended uncritically on the British mission to the Cannibal Isles (modern day Fiji). It was a mistake to put Lord Sandwich in charge. A better choice would have been Lord Marmite. That stuff tastes like shit. 

However it is read, Nostromo offers a profoundly unforgiving view, and it has quite literally enabled the equally severe view of Western imperialist illusions in Graham Greene's The Quiet American

Greene was a Catholic & thus would have supported the Dictator who took power in the year his book came out. In a sense, he was prescient. Kennedy bumped off that Catholic fanatic to placate the Buddhist majority. 

or V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the. River,

Which is about how fucking horrible Africans are. Naipaul, as a rural Indian Trinidadian, resented the more urbane Afro-Caribbeans.  

novels with very different agendas.

Which had nothing to do with Imperialism. Greene was aware that his people were fighting the Commies in Malaya at that time.  

Few readers today, after Vietnam, Iran, the Philippines, Algeria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq, would disagree that it is precisely the fervent innocence of Greene's Pyle

He isn't innocent at all. He is a CIA agent handing out plastic explosives for car bombs- an excuse for a coup. What Greene doesn't seem to have grasped was that the Catholic PM had American support but was hated by the French. That's why he was able to take power (once the Americans made it clear they would not financially support a pro-French general) after the departing French overplayed their hand. 

I suppose Said hadn't read Greene's book. He had seen the film where the American turns out to be wholly innocent. The Brit had believed otherwise so as to get rid of a rival in love.

or Naipaul's Father Huismans, men for whom the native can be educated into "our" civilization, that turns out to produce the murder, subversion, and endless instability of" primitive" societies.

Naipaul had been educated into the same fucking civilization as Said. His mother tongue was Hindi as Said's was Arabic.  

A similar anger pervades films like Oliver Stone's Salvador, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Constantin Costa-Gavras's Missing, in which unscrupulous CIA operatives and power mad officers manipulate natives and well-intentioned Americans alike.

Greene was a direct ancestor of that stripe of shite. Lots of his books- including 'Quiet American' (though with the denouement reversed) were Naipaul had nothing to do with it.  

Yet all these works, which are so indebted to Conrad's anti-imperialist irony in Nostromo;

There is no Imperialism in it. One might say that Somerset Maugham's Ashenden influenced Greene & that Greene influenced le Carre. It must be said, Greene's 'The Human Factor' is the cream of that particular crop.

Imperialist espionage is John Buchan & Lawrence van der Post & so forth. 

argue that the source of the world's significant action and life is in the West, whose representatives seem at liberty to visit their fantasies and philanthropies upon a mind-deadened Third World.

Its academics may do so. Its representatives have to be more careful. The first US Foreign Service  to be killed while on active duty was Robert Whitney Imbrie. He was killed, probably on orders of the man who would become the first Shah, in 1924 in Teheran. The excuse was that the mob thought he was a Ba'hai! American diplomacy in Iran has now come full circle. Trump has taken out the Supreme Guide and a lot of his henchmen. 

In this view, the outlying regions of the world have no life, history, or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West.

Nobody holds this view save some ignorant academics from Cairo or Delhi or Teheran.  

And when there is something to be described it is, following Conrad, unutterably corrupt,

like Tammany Hall? 

degenerate, irredeemable.

Chinatown- starring Jack Nicholson.  

But whereas Conrad wrote Nostromo during a period of Europe's largely uncontested imperialist enthusiasm,

Because of the Monroe doctrine, there was no fucking enthusiasm for adventures in Latin America.  

contemporary novelists and filmmakers who have learned his ironies so well have done their work after decolonization, after the massive intellectual, moral, and imaginative overhaul and deconstruction of Western representation of the non-Western world, after the work of Frantz Fanon,

whose native Martinique chose to remain with France. Since he didn't know Arabic, he could say nothing of Algeria.  

Amflcar Cabral,

who may have been read by some Portuguese people. He was irrelevant because the Portuguese Empire- like Portugal itself- was utterly shit.  

C.L.R. James,

okay on cricket but otherwise silly. Minty Alley was a fucking embarrassment. Say what you like about VS Nightfall, Biswas has a decent enough house.  

Walter Rodney,

 killed by his own people. Everyone's a fucking critic. 

after the -novels and plays of Chinua Achebe,

novels. Wole Soyinka wrote the plays. 

Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garda Marquez,

Shoba De, Paddington Bear, Winnie the Pooh 

and many others. Thus Conrad has passed along his residual imperialist propensities,

he had none. The guy was against the Tzarist Empire though he understood that the Kaisers & Hapsburgs had to go too if Poland was to be independent. By the time he died, he understood that Communism too was a threat.  

although his heirs scarcely have an excuse to justify the often subtle and unreflecting bias of their work.

Rushdie keeps trying to annex Nigeria. Wole Soyinka retaliates by attacking Baluchistan.  

This is not just a matter of Westerners who do not have enough sympathy for or comprehension of foreign cultures-- since there are, after all, some artists and intellectuals who have, in effect, crossed to the other side- Jean Genet,

Homosexuality was legal in France. If he crossed over to the other side, he might become subject to Sharia law.  

Basil Davidson,

well liked by journalistic circles in Africa. Was he a spy? Perhaps. But for which side? 

Alben Memmi,

a Zionist. Maybe Said didn't know this. He didn't actually read very much. It made his brain hurt.  

Juan Goytisolo,

a major figure. He doesn't belong with the others. If you really want a critique of Western Imperialism, this is a guy you could start with.  

and others.

Said himself?

What is perhaps more relevant is the political willingness to take seriously the alternatives to imperialism, among them the existence of other cultures and societies.

Why take imaginary alternatives seriously? True, Mrs Thatcher could have raped General Galtieri & then rented out his rectum to Arthur Scargil and Ayatollah Khomeini, but how relevant to our current predicament is the political willingness to take seriously the possibility that the Supreme Guide of Iran might now be safely alive inside the colon of an elderly Argentine military officer?  

Whether one believes that Conrad's extraordinary fiction confirms habitual Western suspicions about Latin America, Africa, and Asia,

Only a fool would believe a fiction confirms a belief already established by facts- e.g. the ones Conrad observed when he worked in that region.  

or ·whether one sees in novels like Nostromo and Great Expectations the lineaments of an astonishingly durable imperial worldview,

 Only a cretin would so. There is no Imperialism in either. Pip gets a windfall. Who is it from? A pirate or a convict or some other such disreputable person. What matters is that it isn't from the Prince of Persia or the Japanese Mikado or some other glamorous or romantic source.  

capable of warping the perspectives of reader and author equally: both those ways of reading the real alternatives seem outdated. The world today does not exist as a spectacle about which we can be either pessimistic or optimistic, about which our "texts" can be either ingenious or boring.

Nonsense! There are good books about people from different classes or countries coming together to create new technologies which can create 'abundance' & reverse climate change etc.  

All such attitudes involve the deployment of power and interests.

None do. You can have any attitude you like. Mine is that of a teen-age Vampire Slayer. 

To the extent that we see Conrad both criticizing and reproducing the imperial ideology of his time,

He didn't know it & certainly didn't try to criticize it.  

to that extent we can characterize our own present attitudes: the projection, or the refusal, of the wish to dominate, the capacity to damn, or the energy to comprehend and engage with other societies, traditions, histories.

In other words, we can't do shit because Conrad didn't do the thing Said said he did.  

The world has changed since Conrad and Dickens in ways that have surprised, and often alarmed, metropolitan Europeans and Americans,

Very true. I recall bumping into Mrs Thatcher at the Finchley Road Marks & Spencer in 1977. She was very alarmed that Work Houses no longer existed. I suggested she become Prime Minister & revive that admirable institution. She phoned me five tears later. Was it true, she asked, that sailing ships no longer cross the Atlantic to Argentina. I confirmed this was the case. The world has changed since the days of Joseph Conrad, Prime Minister. She was greatly surprised and alarmed. That is why she sank the Belgrano.  

who now confront large non-white immigrant populations in their midst, and face an impressive roster of newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard.

Sadly, Enoch Powell's tales of White ladies being terrorized by jiggaboos had fallen on deaf ears. Still, we all laughed heartily when Rushdie's 'narratives' caused Pakistanis in England to bay for his blood.  

The point of my book is that such populations and voices have been there for some time,

making money not teaching worthless shite 

thanks to the globalized process set in motion by modern imperialism; to ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to

make money not teach worthless shite 

miss what is essential about the world in the past century.

if you miss out on making money you know nothing about what is essential in the real world. 

Edward Said wrong on Joseph Conrad- part 1

What happens to men when they live away from women? If they do so on board ships regulated by the Law of the Sea- which, after all, is Mother before it is Mistress- you are safe enough. But what happens if you become a land pirate and reap the fruit of your inequity far away from Davy Jones' locker? That were, indeed, a horror of horrors. 

Still, horror may be preferable to an insufferable routine yielding diminishing returns & ever narrowing socio-political horizons. Gender dimorphism militates for some men to remain without women & some maiden aunts to, as the price of their 'independence', maintain inheritable capital or conserve  generational wealth while subscribing to illusions of an Ecumenical or Utilitarian type.

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 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. True, he might have ended up in the Bankruptcy Court or might have done a spell of porridge for fraud. But plenty of other entrepreneurs had had their ups and downs. Still, there was a notion that the proverbial 'black sheep' couldn't fall too foul of the law in the dark Continent. He was more likely to die of malaria instead. 

 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. Such were the delusions necessary to preserve petit bourgeois pieties. 

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. It is like the notion of 'Charter Cities', or territories run by Private Corporations.

 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. The one endearing thing about the book is that it shows British Naval hegemony as granting a sort of ersatz Englishry to even a crazy Russian who, however, worships a British book on mathematical navigation as his Bible. Conrad may not have been 'one of us', but he curried favour with us well enough.

I may mention, the Republic of 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. He would have preferred Liberia to have a British administration like Sierra Leone. I imagine that Conrad & Casement & Conan Doyle's Congo books confirmed Brits in the belief that Africa could stride towards prosperity & self-determination if, as in Sierra Leone, the Brits served as Guardians.

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 within it. Conrad himself is an example of the civilizing effect of service in the British Merchant Marine. He might be a Pole but he wasn't a polecat. The only mention of handsome Negresses in 'Heart' dwells on the 'demon lover', not the dynamite vagina, Romantic trope. 

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 and deluded as to how the world worked. 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 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- like that of Dick Whittington- were no longer self-contained. They refered outside themselves- like Oliver Twist- 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 who had only gone to the US after coming of age. He was a journalist & explorer of genius. His mistake was to trust in the integrity of the Queen's cousin. 

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, if necessary, 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 importing West Indian or African American lawyers & engineers 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 with 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.