Summary
Joseph Conrad’s novella, written between 1898 and 1899, from which Edward Said takes the epigraph of Culture and Imperialism and whose narrative form is the subject of Chapter One, III, Two Visions in Heart of Darkness (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.6, p.46-54 / printed p.19-27).
Details
- Its imperial attitude, as Said reads it: Marlow acknowledges that “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence” yet conveys the enormous power of Kurtz’s African experience through his overmastering narrative of the voyage up-river to Kurtz’s Inner Station, whose source and authority he becomes; Kurtz’s great looting adventure, Marlow’s journey and the narrative itself share a common theme — Europeans performing acts of imperial mastery and will in (or about) Africa (PDF p.49-50 / printed p.22-23).
- The tale is told to a group of British listeners, drawn largely from the business world, on the deck of the Nellie, Conrad’s way of emphasizing that during the 1890s the business of empire had become the empire of business; what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for like-minded British hearers and limited to that situation (PDF p.50-51 / printed p.23-24).
- The novella works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist — in the closing years of the nineteenth century an apparently inevitable aesthetic, politics and even epistemology — which eliminated non-imperialist alternatives and made them unthinkable; yet situating the tale in a narrative moment lets the reader realize imperialism was circumscribed by a larger history just outside the circle of Europeans on the Nellie, a region Conrad left empty (PDF p.51 / printed p.24).
- Chapter One, III’s conclusion (PDF p.55-57 / printed p.28-30): Conrad’s self-consciously circular narrative forms draw attention to themselves as artificial constructions, encouraging a sense of a reality inaccessible to imperialism, just beyond its control; through dislocations in the narrator’s language and what Ian Watt calls “delayed decoding”, Marlow unsettles the idea of empire and reality itself. Kurtz and Marlow acknowledge that what they call “the darkness” has an autonomy of its own and can reinvade and reclaim what imperialism had taken, but they cannot recognize it as a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence: Said’s summary of Conrad’s tragic limitation (given without quotation marks because the copy garbles several words in the passage; wording checked against the original): Conrad could see clearly that imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, yet could not conclude that imperialism had to end so that natives could lead lives free from European domination.
- In Chapter Two, I the novella is an organic part of the “scramble for Africa” contemporary with its composition, and to represent Africa is to enter the battle over Africa; Marlow’s contrast of the Romans — “no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze and nothing more” — with modern efficiency and devotion to an idea encapsulates two aspects of imperialism, the power to take over territory and the justificatory regime that disguises it (PDF p.95-96 / printed p.68-69).
- Its form makes possible two visions in the post-colonial world: one allowing the old imperial enterprise full scope to render the world as official Western imperialism saw it and to consolidate itself after World War Two, and a second, local to a time and place, which — because Conrad dates imperialism and shows its contingency — permits later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies (PDF p.52-53 / printed p.25-26).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Imperialism, Edward Said