Joseph Conrad

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2007 by Gorra, Michael

When Naipaul turns to "Heart of Darkness," he concentrates on Marlow's discovery, in a riverside hut, of an obscure book on navigation. One approach to "Heart of Darkness" is to focus on the dialectic the tale enacts between "civilization" and "savagery" -a dialectic summed up in Marlow's account of his own desire for a "howl and a dance." But that tattered volume suggests something more complicated. For what is it doing in the Congo at all? An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship seems innocent enough, and yet both its presence and its subject speaks to the often appalling business of a world slowly knitting itself into one. So too does its owner, a young Russian whose "very existence" in Africa seems "improbable, inexplicable." It is, however, no more "inconceivable" than Marlow's own, and at the end of the story Conrad proffers a vision of a great "waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth," a vision that presents the cargo-carrying Thames-"this river"-as running out across the ocean and up into the mouth of "that river," of the Congo itself. The two become as one, a world in which the land is stitched together by water: a liquid world, through which both capital and people themselves seem perpetually to stream.

Every page that Conrad wrote both presumes and undermines an identity between person and place, for he relies on the fixities of nineteenth-century nationalism to define his characters even as he charts a world in which they are all out of joint. Take "Typhoon" (1902), in which the steamer Nan-Shan moves under its Irish captain through the China Sea, carrying a freight of what we would now call guest workers, "coolies returning to their village homes." Take Nostromo, set in what Naipaul describes as a "half-made" Latin American republic, where the indispensable man of the people is a Genoese sailor, the funding comes from San Francisco, and the country-born tycoon is ineradicably English. To read Conrad in this way is to remember that one of the places he had been before Naipaul was London itself, that great beach of the unsettled and the lost.

In fact, it sometimes seems that the hardest thing to find in his books is a British subject at work in a part of the map splotched red. Conrad saw what would come. He maps the upheaval and the restlessness produced by a world system, an incipient global society, at the very moment it comes into being. The Congo's European outposts may cloak their greed in the fiction of progress, but the imperialism Conrad describes isn't concerned with administration so much as with money, with the movement of commodities like ivory and rubber and even, in one story, potatoes. It is a system so powerful that it can either supersede governments or bend them to its will, as it does in Nostromo, where the Occidental Republic comes into being for the sake of the San Tomé mine. For in the "development of material interests," as that novel's Dr. Monyngham says, "There is no peace and no rest," no true center and no final periphery, no border and no home.