Summary
Novelist whose Nostromo and Heart of Darkness are Edward Said’s central examples in Culture and Imperialism of a writer both anti-imperialist and imperialist: the precursor of Western views of the Third World, whose residual imperialist propensities his heirs scarcely have an excuse to repeat (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.17-19 / printed p.xviii-xx).
Details
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Said takes the epigraph of Culture and Imperialism from Heart of Darkness: “What redeems it is the idea only” (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.6).
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In Nostromo (1904), Conrad forecasts the unrest and “misrule” of the Latin American republics and singles out North America’s decisive yet barely visible influence, yet writes with a Western view so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, cultures and aspirations; he could not believe anti-imperialist independence movements were not all corrupt and in the pay of puppet masters in London or Washington (PDF p.16-17 / printed p.xvii-xviii).
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Colonialism turned Conrad, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, and he was so self-conscious about what he did that Heart of Darkness is also a dramatization of Marlow telling his story to British listeners drawn largely from the business world (PDF p.49-50 / printed p.22-23).
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Conrad could only imagine the world carved up into one or another Western sphere of dominion, but his residual sense of his own exilic marginality qualified Marlow’s narrative with provisionality, and he preserved an ironic distance in each of his works; he was not a great imperialist entrepreneur like Cecil Rhodes or Frederick Lugard (PDF p.51-52 / printed p.24-25).
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Since Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency and records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste, he permits later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if he had little notion of what that Africa might be (PDF p.52-53 / printed p.25-26).
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In Chapter Two, VI, Conrad and Flaubert are paired: both emphasize solitary figures whose self-created structures take the same form as the colonizer at the center of an empire he rules, and Marlow, in narrating his African journey, repeats and confirms Kurtz’s action, restoring Africa to European hegemony by historicizing and narrating its strangeness; Achebe’s criticism that Conrad was a racist does not go far enough, since in Nostromo and Victory the same pitying contempt and exoticism extend to Indians, Spaniards and Southeast Asian peasants, and Conrad’s fiction confirmed, rather than challenged, its European audience (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.190-193 / printed p.163-166).
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In Chapter Two, VIII, Conrad’s narratives radiate an extreme, unsettling anxiety in response to the triumph of empire, taking narrative into the self-consciousness, discontinuity and corrosive irony of Modernism (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.215 / printed p.188).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Edward Said, Imperialism