The method is unsound: the aesthetic dissonance of colonial justification in Kipling, Conrad, and Greene - authors Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene

Style, Fall, 1996 by James Scannell

Further, Conrad aligns this greatness with trade - "'He was a common trader . . . nothing more'" - and presents the manager as a representative of delimited spheres of trade, influence, and action (Heart 22). The manager views the Russian as a threat to ordered spheres of trade: "They approached again, just as the manager was saying, 'No one, as far as I know, unless a species of wandering trader - a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from the natives'" (Heart 32), and "'It must be this miserable trader - this intruder,' exclaimed the manager. . . . 'He must be English,' I said. 'It will not save him from getting into trouble if he is not careful,' muttered the manager darkly" (Heart 39). He insists at all times on respecting the boundaries of spheres of action: "'Well, I must defer to your judgment. You are captain,' he said, with marked civility" (Heart 43); "'The district is closed to us for a time'" (Heart 63); and "'It is my duty to point it out in the proper quarter'" (Heart 63). The manager is no paragon, as Marlow's hatred for him makes clear,(16) but in a world in which "the conscience of but very few men amongst us, and of no single Western nation as yet, will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a material advantage" ("Autocracy" 110), his pragmatic, compartmentalized rule is the safest option.

Like Conrad does with Kipling, Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter begins where Conrad's narrative leaves off, embodying in its first section his materialist justification for the colonial enterprise. Though reference to it is subtle, set far in the background of Greene's narrative, the land and its allure are at the heart of Scobie's desire to stay in West Africa:

He said aloud, "You know I like the place." "I believe you do. I wonder why." "It's pretty in the evening," Scobie said vaguely. (Matter 17)

The narrator registers for the reader the inadequacy of Scobie's reply, which seems an odd, insufficient reason for staying, particularly in light of his wife's desire to leave and his overwrought feelings of responsibility for her. But what seems at first like an off-hand comment gets picked up in the narrative, taking on a seriousness that the first comment never even vaguely suggests:

In the evening the port became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a grey wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.

Scobie stopped his Morris at one of the great loops of the climbing road and looked back. He was just too late. The flower had withered upwards from the town; the white stones that marked the edge of the precipitous hill shone like candles in the new dusk. (Matter 26)

The days in the colony are harsh, and the nights, as Scobie's wearisome duels with Louise suggest, hardly restful. But evening is "the hour of content." Scobie, as he himself acknowledges, is seeking "peace" "content[ment]," and the land at evening provides these for him. Though not exactly Conrad's image of the rich, untapped, colonized land, the land as presented in book 1 nonetheless is the reason for Scobie, representative of British law in the colony not coincidentally, to stay in West Africa: for him it has a value that ensures his continued presence there. Also like Conrad, Greene aligns the value of the land, in this case its temporary beauty that gives Scobie a brief nightly repose, with work: "He had nearly everything, and all he needed was peace. Everything meant work, the daily regular routine in the little bare office, the change of seasons in a place he loved" (Matter 59). The throw-away tag, "a place he loved," emphasizes the connection: the land provides peace, and Scobie longs only to work (in) that land. Further, this notion that the land itself, the very physicality of it, imparts "peace" to Scobie suggests that Greene also recognizes the motivation, as suggested in "Autocracy and War," for Conrad's turn to materialism: that the land, both in what it yields and in its partition, may offer the only viable chance for peace in the context of the present state of the world. Greene rather ingeniously transplants Conrad's justification for the colonial project to the West African world and the life of his British police captain, Scobie, for the purpose of critiquing it, in the same way that Conrad critiqued Kipling.