ABSTRACT
Name:
Bruce McLure
Title:
The White Man's Burden Theme
in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad
Departmen t:
English
Degree:
M.A.
This thesis analyses Joseph Conrad's use of the white man's
burden theme in several of his early works.
By linking it
to Conrad's social philosophy the thesis demonstrates that
Conrad's presentation of the burden was a means by which he
could dramatize his view of the permanent conflict he believed
existed between individuals and social groups.
Mc LURE
JOSEPH CONROD AND THE WlITTE MAN' S BURDEN
McLURE, The White Man's Burden Theme in the
Fiction of Josèph Conrad.
The White Man's Burden Theme in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad
by
Bruce McLure
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and
Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the
degree of Master of Arts.
April, 1970
McGill University
Montreal
e.
f
®
Bruce Mc Lure
1970
CONTENTS
Introduction . • • • • • • • • • • • • •
...
i
l
Imperialisrn and the whi te man' s burden •
1
II
Conrad's view of imperialism and the white man's burden
8
III
The Lingard Trilogy
18
IV
"An outpost of Progress" and "Heart of Darkness"
33
V
Lord Jim
56
Conclusion
76
Bibliography .
82
i
INTRODUCTION
This thesis analyses Joseph Conrad's use of the
white man's burden theme in several of his early works
where it is of major importance.
By first tracing the
evolution of the burden concept and showing its relation
to economic and social forces it is placed in historical
perspective.
Then other literary expressions of the burden
theme by contemporaries of Conrad are briefly mentioned.
Finally, Conrad's attitude to the white man's burden is
examined and the way in which this attitude is reflected
in his art is investigated by thoroughly analysing the
wOI:ks in which i t appears.
An
understanding of Conrad's artistic application
of the burden theme is impossible without a knowledge of
his general view of the individual's relationship to society.
The thesis attempts to show that previous critics have
frequently misunderstood Conrad's social philosophy and
this has led them to overlook or misinterpret important
tensions in his art.
The burden theme is of particular
interest here since Conrad used it as a medium through which
he could explore the conflicts he believed existed between
individuals and social groups.
l
l - IMPERIALISM AND THE WHITE MAN' S BUIIDEN
During most of Conrad's lifetime the major European powers were
engaged in a scramble for overseas colonies.
Great Britain alone increased
her area holdings by Il,000,000 square kilometres from 1876 to 1914.
1
This
fin-de-si~cle rapacious spurt was the culmination of 300 years of colonial
expansion by the Europeans and marked the completion of the territorial
division of the world.
Lenin clearly explains the economic reasons for
this imperialist upsurge,2 but he fails to touch on an equally important
aspect of the process:
how the European ruling classes justified increased
colonial expansion at this time to the people back home.
Luckily for the
capitalists, they not only profited most from imperialism but they also
control1ed the European state apparatus and media through which they could
conveniently propagandize about its benefits to the public.
Sometimes this
was done by stressing the economic necessity of controlling foreign territories in order to obtain raw materials.
This was the "Trade follows
the Flag" argument which J.A. Hobson discusses in depth.
3
with such economic reasons were those of military strategy:
Often allied
the mother
country's lines of communication must be kept clear, so it is necessary to
have overseas bases; or, other dependencies must be protected, so nearby
foreign are as must be expropriated in order to be within convenient distance
of them.
By far the most subtle excuse for imperialism, however, and the
one that"mainly concerns us here, is the argument that imperialism is
l
V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest stage of Capitalism
(Peking, 1965), p. 95.
2Ibid~ pp. 89-104.
3 Imper~a
' l '~sm:
~
Study (London, 1938), pp. 33-40.
2
beneficial to backward peoples because it brings Christian teaching and
advanced technology which helps improve and "civilize" them.
was prevalent from
This approach
ea~ly colonial times,4 and to a greater or lesser extent
played a continuing role in imperialist thinking.
During the 17th and J8th
centuries most colonies were simply plundered for raw materials and used as
a dumping ground for fini shed products, with token gestures made by the
European colonizers to Christian principles.
The Industrial Revolution
and the victory of capitalist economic principles drastically changed this,
especially in England where capitalism first took hold.
Mercantilism gave
way to Free Trade, and the sense of responsibility of the mother country
to its dependencies was altered.
With the exception of India, British
capitalists in the first half of the 19th century saw the colonies as an
unnecessary burden.
They realized that Britain's lead in industrialization
combined with the doctrine of Free Trade meant that she could dominate the
world economically, and therefore the expense of maintaining private
colonies to trade with was unnecessary:5
Behind the screen of a navy far larger than that of any
rival power, the economic penetration of the British
Empire and of the Far East was pushed ahead. In Europe
all serious entanglements were avoided as far as possible,
British influence being exerted only to prevent any one
power from securing a predominating position. The more
powerful states were treated with the utmost circumspection:
the smaller ones were bullied whenever bullying seemed
likely to be profitable. 6
4Records of voyages made in 1583 and 1629 reveal the Christian
motives of the explorers as well as their commercial zeal. See Richard Faber,
The Vision and the Need (London, 1966), p. 37.
p. 373.
5
E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London, 1968) , p. 196.
6
A.L. Morton, A PeoEle's History of England (New York, 1938),
e
3
Of course, absolute stability was impossible.
The Crimean War flared in
1854, but England's involvement in this came primarily from fear of being
cut off from her only really important colonial possession, India.
An
interesting point to note is that the publicly stated reason for the war
was the protection of the Holy Land.
7
This fits perfectly imperialism's
constant pattern of always concealing its economic motives beneath a
htlmanitarian disguise.
In Britain the desire for peaceful economic expansion lasted
until the 1860's and 1870's, when the laissez-faire attitude began to
disintegrate rapidly because of competitive commercial pressure from other
European powers who were finally reaching the British level of industrialization.
A new mood of imperialism came to dominate Europe as the advanced
capitalist countries tried to carve up the map to maximize their own profits.
A secondary reason for this economic competition, at least in England, was
to relieve internaI dis content caused by the periodic depressions in the
last three decades of the 19th century.
An arch-imperialist like Cecil
Rhodes clearly saw the dangers inherent in these economic slumps:
My cheri shed idea is a solution for the social problem,
i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the
United Kingdom from abloody civil war, we colonial
statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus
population, to provide new markets for the goods produced
in the factories and mines. The Empire, as l have always
said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to
avoid civil war you must become imperialists. 8
Such statements show how totally imperialism
economic motives.
is bound
up with
What we must concern ourselves with now is how the
7 Ibid., p. 375.
8Quoted by Lenin, ~.cit., pp. 93-94.
4
imperialists justified these motives by modernizing the idea of the white
man's burden, and how Conrad responded to this in his art.
As was mentioned
previously, the early explorers mouthed Christian ideals while looting
overseas colonies.
This tactic was still common during the time we are
dealing with, but secular reasons carried more weight than before.
A key date to keep in mind when considering how imperialism
justified its aggressive tendencies is 1859, for this is when The Origin
of .the Species first appeared.
Evolutionary ideas shook the religious faith
of many Victorians, and, of course, with religious doubt came misgivinqs
about the spiritual efficacity of missionary work.
But the religious
problems caused by Darwin's theories were more than compensated for by the
social relevance they had when distorted by the imperialists into a defense
for their actions.
This occurred on two levels.
Between individu aIs
'survival of the fittest' "identified the economic struggle for existence
with the course of nature.
That the stronger should push the weaker to
the wall was not only a cosmic fact, it was a beneficient process by which
the nation got rid of its liabilities.,,9.
And between nations "social
Darwinism could equally justify war and militarisme
It could give phil-
osophical sanction to the chauvinism that grew up in the second half of
the century with the increasing intensity of national rivalries."lO
This
chauvinism often expressed Anglo-Saxon feelings of racial superiority.
Darwin's ideas were useful here and became a "new instrument in the hands
of the theorists of race and struggle."
Il
It is in relation to this that
9
Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870
(New Haven, 1957), p. 209.
10Ibid., pp. 209-210.
llRichard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought
(New York, 1959), p. 172.
5
the concept of the white man's burden is particularly important.
The
imperialist assurnption was that since the European races had moved further
down the evolutionary trail than those of Africa and Asia then it was
obviously beneficial to the latter to be conquered and "improved".
would save
th~
It
countless generations of slow growth if they obeyed the
whites and adopted their advanced ways swiftly.
Of course, ignorant
savages could not be expected to know what was in their own best interest,
so sometimes it was necessary to purge them of their regressive tendencies
by force.
Cruel as this seemed, in the long run the process would be
beneficial to aIl concerned.
That the English ruling class used this type
of thinking as a major reason for imperialist ventures is seen by reading
popular Victorian newspapers and maqazines.
A few exarnples will suffice:
Before late 19th century expansionism had really reached its peak the Earl
of Carnarvon, Disraeli's Colonial Secretary, was planting the seeds of proimperialist propaganda about the backward races of the Empire:
To them it is our part to give wise laws, good government,
and a well-ordered finance, which is the foundation of good
things in hurnan communitieSi it is ours to provide thern with
a system where the humblest may enjoy freedom from oppression
and wrong equally with the greatesti where the light of
moralitr and religion can penetrate into the darkest dwelling
places. 2
Near the end of the century, as the competition for colonies intensified,
Carnarvon's cool rhetoric gave way to a more overt racism, as the popular
press grew stridently anxious to convince people of the necessity of
imperialism's methods:
12 Earl of Carnarvon, ' '
l ' 1 Adm'~n~s
. t ra t'~on, "Th
' htly
mper~a
~ F
or tn~g
Review, 30 (Dec. l, 1878), 751-64.
6
The dutY of the white man is to conquer and control,
probably for a couple of centuries, aIl the dark people
of the world, not for his own good, but for theirs . . •
There are races which are morally lunatic, races which
are as children, races which are to the white man as
the lowest residium of Europe are to English Judges,
and the right to prote ct them, to educate them, to
guide and urge them, seems to us as clear in the one
case as in the other. 13
Generally, however, the justification for imperialism was more subtle
than this, and mainly stressed the importance of sharing the gbries of
European civilization with less privileged peoples:
British rule . • . means government, not for the sake
of fortune to individuals, or even glory to the nation,
but for the sake of civilization - in other words, for
the diffusion of peace and justice over regions where
these blessings have hitherto been unknown. 14
The voices of anti-imperialists were not entirely silenced during
this time, but the roar of pro-imperialist sentiment, inspired by the newly
sensational press, definitely prevented them from being clearly heard.
Conrad recognized this fact and remained publicly aloof from the debate,
preferring to conceal his criticism of imperialism within his art.
But
many favourite authors of the period openly supported England's aggressiveness and used their writings to praise its merits.
Kipling is the best
known, and he consistently proclaims the responsibility of the white man
to the
new-caught, su lIen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child. 15
Swinburne, too, in his later poetry, praises England as the leader among
l3
Anon., "The White Man's Burden", The Spectator, 82 (Feb. Il, 1899),
193-4.
14Anon ., "The Literary Inspiration of Imperialism", The Living Age,
CCXXV (June, 1900), 801-811.
15"The White Man's Burden" , Rudyard Kip1ing's Verse 1885-1918
(Toronto, n.d.), p. 371.
7
nations:
If the race that is the first of the races of
men who behold unashamed the sun
Stand fast and forget not the sign that is
given of the years and the wars that are done,
The token that aIl who are born of its blood
should in heart as in blood be one. 16
If Swinburne is more rhetorical than precise in his praise of imperialism,
Henley is closer to Kipling in his emotiona1 sincerity:
They calI you proud and hard
England, my Englandl
You with worlds to watch and ward,
England, my ownl
You whose mailed hand keeps the keys
Of such teeming destinies,
You could know nor dread nor ease. 17
In general,
above.
18
less~r
known poets of the time echo the tone of the
three
Thus, one can safely say that the maintenance and growth of the
imperial idea was a key issue for most late victorians, and the politicians,
press, and poets, by stressing the importance of upholding the white man's
burden, helped mould public opinion into accepting it as a necessity for
England.
16
"England:
An Ode", Collected Poetical Works (London, n.d.),
p. 1027.
17
"Pro Rege Nostro", Poems (London, 1921), p. 231.
18For a detailed discussion of poetical responses to imperialism
see Allan Thomson, Imperialism in English poetry Between 1875 and 1900
(Unpublished M.A. Th~sis, McGill University, 1946).
8
II - CONRAD'S VIEW OF IMPERIALISM AND THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN
An examination of Çonrad's general view of man in society will
help to place his opinions of the white man's burden within a broader
contexte
The novelist's most detailed revelation of his social views are
to be found in the correspondence he exchanged with a close friend,
R.B. Cunninghame Graham.
Cunninghame Graham was a flamboyant socialist,19
and his ideas on the general nature of society provoked Conrad, who had a
radically different perspective, into elaborating on his own most basic
thoughts.
Politically a conservative, Conrad distrusted change.
But since
he was from an aristocratic background he despised the middle-class values
he found so dominant in England at the end of the Victorian age.
accounts for his attitude towards social institutions.
This
He had no sympathy
for those who wanted radical social change, because he thought this would
only bring chaos.
At the same time he criticized the materialism and the
commercial spirit his society was based on because these did not seem to
be noticeably improving the quality of human existence.
Underlying these
attitudes was Conrad's deep pessimism about the possibility of any social
changes affecting the deepest levels of human nature.
Being a socialist, CUnninghame Graham believed that man was
perfectible if society could be improved.
differences with Conrad, who
thoug~t
This is at the core of his
that no matter what social improvements
were made these still would not change the fact that man is basically
irrational and unreliable.
He admired Cunninghame Graham for his worthy
19For a description of Cunninghame Graham'sappearance and
adventures see Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography
(New York, 1967), pp. 195-98.
9
ideals, but he thought it impossible for them ever to be put into practice:
You want from men faith, honour, fidelity to truth in
themselves and others. You want them to have aIl this,
to show it every day, to make out of these words their
rules of life • . • What makes you dangerous is your
unwarrantable belief that your desire may be realized.
This is the only point of difference between us. 20
Even if Cunninghame Graham's ideals were realizable Conrad would see little
sense in striving to achieve them:
The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from
cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to
heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe
in improvement you must weep)l! for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. 21
Conrad's generalization negates the idea of meaningful progress, for he
rejects the desirability of working for change by saying that death takes
aIl in the long run so to strive is futile.
The passage is also anti-
romantic in its awareness of the futility of striving to transcend one's
concrete situation by pursuing an ideal.
This view applies directly to
Conrad's writing, especially in regard to the aspirations of Kurtz, Jim,
and Charles Gould.
Conrad's belief in the limitations of idealism makes
him pessimistic about the possibility of any long term improvement for
mankind.
Another letter goes into this more deeply:
You and your ideals of sincerity and truth are strangely
out of place in this epoch of material preoccupations.
What does it bring? What's the profit? What do we get
by it? These questions are the root of every moral,
intellectual or political movement . • • Alasl What you
want to reform are not institutions, - it is human nature.
20Letter to Cunninghame Graham, Dec. 20, 1897, in G. Jean-Aubry,
Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, l (New York, 1927), 215.
2lLetter to Cunninghame Graham, Jan. 14, 1898.
l,
222.
Life and Letters,
10
Your faith will never move that mountain. Not that I
think mainkind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and
cowardly.22
This is why meaningful external change is impossible:
no matter how far
man may seem to advance, the regressive tendencies in his nature, especially
those inspired by material greed, will always eventually surface to disrupt
his tidy moral schemes.
But if man is not "intrinsically bad", what accounts
for the inordinate amount of evil and suffering in the world?
who is merely "silly and cowardly" cause aIl this?
Could a being
Conrad ''''lveals his
answer in another letter:
L'homme est un animal méchant. Sa méchanceté doit ~tre
organiséÊ!. Le crime est une condition nécessaire de
l'existence organisée. La société est essentiellement
criminelle, - ou elle n'existerait pas. C'est l'égoisme
qui sauve tout, - absolument tout, - tout ce que nous
abhorrons, tout ce que nous aimons. 23
Many major critics of Conrad have ignored this direct pronouncement from
his letter and have never tested its relevance to his art.
24
Stranger still
22Letter to Cunninghame Graham, Feb. (n.d.), 1898, Life and Letters,
I, 229.
23Letter to Cunninghame Graham, Feb. 8, J.899, Life and Letters,
I, 269.
24Among them, William Bancroft, Joseph Conrad: His Philosophy
of Life; John Dozier Gordan, Joseph Conrad: The Making of ~ Novelist;
Leo Gurko, Joseph Conrad: Giant in Exile; Robert Haugh, Joseph Conrad:
Discovery in Design; Robert Hodges, The Dual Heritage of Joseph Conrad;
G. Jean-Aubry, The Sea Dreamer; Bernard Meyer, Joseph Conrad: A
Psychoanalytic BI;graphYi Thomas Moser,Jose~h Conrad: Achievement and
Decline; Claire Rosenfield, paradise of Snakes; J.I.M. Stewart, Joseph
Conrad; Paul Wiley, Conrad's Measure of Man.
11
are those who deal with this particular letter but who refuse to face the
implications of the above passage directly.
Jocelyn Baines, for instance,
states that the letter is Conrad's "most intimate avowal of his political
belief", and he quotes extensively from its crucial middle section except
"h
"
,25
f or exc1s1ng
t e paragraph
conta1n1ng
t h e ab ove 0b servat10n.
Later
Baines does refer to the passage,26 but by plucking it out of context and
presenting it without commentary he certainly does not help to clarify
its meaning.
Albert J. Guerard quotes the passage in a note, but he
leaves out the difficult part in which Conrad deals with the criminal
27
'
nature 0 f soc1ety.
Paul Kirschner is much more informative and shows
the similarity between Conrad's comments and those in Anatole France's
Les Opinions de~. Jérôme Coignard (1893).28
But he does not deal with
Conrad's opinions on the importance of "égoisme", and is content to observe
that the passage simply reaffirms Conrad's belief that nothing can reform
human nature.
29
Avrom Fleishman considers Conrad's friendship with
Cunninghame Graham "one of the chief experiences that brought him to
maturitY",30 and he examines their correspondence in detail.
But he, too,
while dealing with the Feb. 8 letter,3l avoids considering the starkly
direct section quoted above.
25
Joseph Conxad:
In Fleishman's case this omission is more
A Critical Biography (New York, 1967), pp. 201-202.
26 l b'd
1 . , p. 230, p. 448.
27
28
-
Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 308.
Conrad:
The Psychologist As Artist (Edinburgh, 1968), p. 230.
29~.,
b'd
p. 231 .
30 Conrad' s Po l"1 t1CS : Commun1, t y
Joseph Conrad (Baltimore, 1967), p. 25.
31~.,
b'd
p. 29 .
d Anarc h
th F'1C t'10n 0 f
y '1n ~
~
12
understandable than in sorne of the other critics, because Conrad's dour
view of society's criminal suppression of the individual is hardly compatible with his thesis that Conrad "affirros that an integrated community,
in whatever forro and of whatever magnitude, is the only viable framework
of man's life.,,32
Conrad definitely shows man's dependency on sociai
relationships, but his acute awareness of the conflicting social forces
generated by these makes him reject any idealized possibilities of an
organic community reflecting a harroony of interests.
directly with Conrad's comment,
33
Eloise Hay does deal
but her object is to show its source in
his Polish background and in doing this she confuses his meaning by transposing his views of social restraint into moral categories:
"Society is
thus forroed not as an imposition upon evil human nature, but arises out
of the expression of that nature, good and bad.,,34
This is a direct
reversaI of what Conrad states - that man's perverse tendencies must be
controlled by social rules, and since man will not observe such restraint
voluntarily, the rules have to be imposed.
The critical confusion and neglect regarding Conrad's statement
have prevented its relevance to his fiction from being recognized.
AlI
the works under discussion here show individuals undergoing personal crises
in
t~,e
middle of alien communi ties •
Therefore i t seems sensible to analyse
in depth Conrad's most direct utterance about the relationship between the
individual and society, since it will help in understanding the central
32 ~.,
b'd
p. 76 •
33The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (Chicago and London,
1963), p. 25.
34~.,
b'd
p. 26 .
13
situations of the works to be examined later.
The two key components of
Conrad's thought are "La société est essentiellement criminelle" and
"C'est l'égoisme qui sauve tout."
But Conrad does not simply imply that
the individual and society are in eternal, solitary opposition.
The
situation is much more complex because he sees that both are inextricably
interrelated.
Conrad thinks that man is "silly and cowardly" and "méchant"
(miserable, perverse) .35
In order for people to function collectively
these elements, which make them unstable and irrational, must be controlled
in sorne way, otherwise the world will be totally anarchie.
role.
This is society's
But Conrad draws an important distinction between the individual and
society by his choice of adjective:
society is "criminelle".
where man is only "silly" and "perverse"
Through this difference Conrad suggests the power
of the organized mechanisms of repression society has to contain the perverse
tendencies of its members and he raises an interesting moral problem.
For
if society is "criminelle" in employing its power, is the individual not
justified in rejecting its standards and trying to establish his own?
Again
an important link to Conrad's art can be detected, especially if we consider
the career of someone like Kurtz.
Conrad's social views are similar to
Freud's proposition and Marcuse's elaboration of this:
"Civilization is
based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts.,,36
Like the
two philosophers, Conrad suggests that society is both necessary to man
and inimical to his self-development.
This is why "~goisme" is
50
important.
It is man's recognition that although he must obey certain social conventions
35Eloise Hay suggests "perverse" as a translation for "méchant".
36Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962), p. 3.
14
in order to be able to function with others, he must also strive against
becoming so dependent on these conventions that they totally determine
his existence.
This is when society is "criminelle":
when its processes
sweep the individual along without him realizing where he is going.
Conrad
seems to recognize the importance of a man making an existential choice by
attempting to define himself in relation to his society's standards.
If
he refuses this responsibility in ex change for the comfort and security of
an imposed code of ethics then his individuality will be totally squelched.
Only by daring to express his "égoisme" - his self-awareness in relation
to the social norms that restrict him - can a person prevent this happening.
With this perspective we can better understand Conrad's response
to events of his day.
His comments in his letters and essays centre on
Russian-polish relations (because of his background), World War l (because
his son was a soldier), and the Boer War.
His reaction to the last is the
most important for our purposes, since it best reveals his attitude to
imperialism and the white man's burden.
imperialist enthusiasm fanned by the war:
in this business.
He is sarcastic towards the pro"There is an appalling fatuity
If l am to believe Kipling this is a war undertaken
for the cause of democracy.
C'est ~ crever de rire!,,37 But in the same
letter he supports the British position:
Now the fun has commenced, l trust British successes will
be crushing from the first, - on the same principle that
if there's murder being done in the next room and you can't
stop it, you wish the head of the victim to be bashed in
forthwith and the whole thing over for the sake of your
own feelings.
37
l, 284-85.
Letter to cunninghame Graham, Oct. 14, 1899, Life and Letters,
15
This seerningly ambivalent attitude is explained in a later letter:
That they - the Boers - are struggling in good faith for
their independence cannot be doubted; but it is also a
fact that they have no idea of liberty, which can only
be found under the English flag aIl over the world. 38
One can see how this position is an extension of his previously examined
attitudes:
just as it is necessary for a particular society to restrain
its members, so on the international level England, which for Conrad was
the most highly developed society, should spread her controlling influence
over the globe.
Of course, this cannot be done without conflict, since
"l'égoisme" of colonized nations is bound to assert itself in order to
protect native culture and values. 39
Conrad's awareness of the inevit-
ability of conflict in the colonizing process is what makes him so critical
of contemporary imperialism.
It is much too agressive for him and not
nearly sensitive enough to the needs of the colonized areas.
England
bears the white man's burden best, but he is disappointed with her conduct
in the Boer War:
It will create a situation of which, unless l am much
mistaken, the country will get weary. The victory, unless it is to be thrown away, - shall have to be
followed by ruthless repression. The situation will
become repugnant to the nation. The "reasonable
English ideals" CI am quoting Sir F. Milner's words)
are not attained in that way. Their instruments are
time and deep-seated convictions of the race, - the
expansi ve force of i ts enterpl:ise and i ts morali ty. 40
38
,
Letter to Angele Zagorska, Dec. 25, 1899, Life and Letters,
I, 288.
39AS a native of pOland, a country ruthlessly dominated for
centuries by Russia, Conrad was acutely aware of the nationalist feelings
generated by such a situation.
40
I, 285.
Letter to E.L. Sanderson, Oct. 26, 1899, Life and Letters,
16
It is clear that for Conrad only British imperialism was in any way
justifiable, and, indeed, he often disapproved of the crude way that this
manifested itself.
unavoidable.
For him, conflict among socially organized humans is
Therefore the proper . course is not to escalate this violence
by clumsy imperialist actions, but, on the international level, to help
cushion the shock when alien cultures interact.
41
In a sense Conrad is
closer to Darwinist thought than any other of his time.
He did not believe
in nature or society "red in tooth and claw", but since, for him, British
society was superior to any other, it was bound to influence and alter
others that came into contact with it.
But, unlike the fervid pro-
imperialists, Conrad saw this process as slowly evolving, and not a sudden
thrusting of European ways on cultures ill-prepared to accept them profitably.
In his early fiction Conrad uses the white man's burden theme to
illuminate his central philosophic position regarding socially organized
man.
He examines the reactions of men isolated from the society that
nurtured them and forced to con tend with difficult situations in primitive
colonial communities.
With the customary rules of white society unenforce-
able, Conrad's heroes are left totally unprepared to face the problems of
their new environment and their own weaknesses.
By means of this basic
pattern Conrad examines in depth their aspirations, the demands of the
"civilized" values they are supposed to represent, and the influence of
the primitive communities on them.
On the political level his investigation
4lThis only applies to Britain's relationship with underdeveloped
areas. Towards her European competitors Conrad's attitude was one of hostile
suspicion, as is natural for one so staunchly pro-British. He thought that
Britain should spread her influence by means of her "enterprise and morality",
but if other powers interfered with her civilizing work they should be
severely dealt with.
17
leads him into a caustic appraisal of the abuses of imperialism.
Conrad's
main emphasis is always on the social and spiritual alienation his heroes
suffer because their behaviour is, in large part, based on reactions to
the false premises of the white man's burden.
sauve tout".
It is here that "L'égoisme
Those who depend simply on the ideology of the burden as a
guide to action in the colonies are doomed to failure, because they are
smothering their individual responses to their new environment and refusing
to come to terms with a different social situation.
Instead they are
mechanically trying to fit it into a preconceived pattern.
On the other
hand, Conrad also examines the problems of men who try to throw off white
values and "go native".
Those who do this also suffer, because they are
accentuating the anarchie tendencies within them.
Having rejected white
rules and not feeling obliged to follow those of the alien community, they
are dangerous to thernselves and the society they are now part of.
The
only way whites can avoid these two types of errors is by adhering firmly
to the positive aspects of the white man's code, while at the same time
re-interpreting their pther values in accordance with the new social
context.
For the most part Conrad's heroes fail to accomplish this, and
by examining the individual works we can see an elaboration of the reasons
why.
18
III - THE LINGARD TRILOGY
Almayer's
Foll~
(1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), and
The Rescue (1919) forro a loose trilogy connected by the figure of
Tom Lingard.
In the first two novels Lingard is not central to most of
the action but serves as the prime mover, the one who instigates it by
placing Almayer and Willems in their predicaments.
A much younger Lingard
is the protagonist of The Rescue, but he is somewhat of a "juvenile hero,,42
because of his general naiveté and especially his adolescent response to
love.
He is a "man ready for the obvious, no matter how startling, how
terrible or menacing, yet defencelessas a child before the shadowy impulses
of his own heart.,,43
Lingard is self-assured about his merits, but he is
basically a romantic who is too easily swayed by his feelings which often
blind him to external circumstances.
The white man's burden theme is present in this last book, but
Conrad's exposure of the doctrine's failings is not nearly so devastating
here as in the early ones.
Shaw and Travers are crude racists who think
non-whites "must be kept in order and won't listen to reason; having not
sense enough to know what's good for them" (p. 22).
Lingard reneges on
his promise ta Hassim and Immada because of his love for Mrs. Travers, and
although this establishes an interesting central point from which Conrad
could have investigated the burden, he never really gets down to questioning the basis of the concept.
42
Lingard's betrayal is seen entirely from
Leo Gurko, Joseph Conrad:
Giant in Exile (New York, 1962),
p. 230.
43
Joseph Conrad, The Rescue (New York, 1925), p. Il. All
subsequent references are to this edition and are in parentheses in the
text.
19
within the perspective of his conflicting personal relationships, and this
tends to sentimentalize his problem.
Also, in terms of the burden, Lingard's
attitudes show no development throughout the book.
He is consistently
paternalistic towards Hassim and Immada and gratifies his ego by assuming
control of their lives.
44
But, despite this, Lingard's presence in the
trilogy as a whole is important because through him Conrad shows us aspects
of how imperialism operated in Malaysia in the last half of the nineteenth
century.
Lingard's activities are modeled on those of Sir James Brooke,
the Rajah of Sarawak, who established himself as a benevolent despot in
the East Indies fifty years before Conrad began writing.
45
Conrad describes
this area of the world in elaborate detail, basing his descriptions on
, d es f rom h'1S nau t 1ca
'
l exper1ences.
'
46
ep1so
The novels include exact views
of the customs and attitudes of the different races in the area:
the Malays
themselves, the Arab traders, the Chinese functionaries, and, of course,
the Europeans like Lingard who so often hid their economic greed beneath
a benevolent exterior.
The British and Dutch had been competing for control
of the East Indies since the l7th century.
reached over territorial rights.
and
trad~ng
In 1881 agreement was finally
This had great influence on the political
life of the area, and Lingard's and Almayer's concern about
whether their trading post will fall under British or Dutch control is
44
As shall be seen, this quality reappears as a characteristic
of Lord Jim.
45see Fleishman, Conrad's Politics, p. 100 ff.
46
For an analysis of Conrad's accuracy in his descriptive detail
see Florence Clemens, "Conrad"s Malaysia," College English, 2 (1940-41),
338-46.
20
based on this situation.
47
Over the years Lingard has wielded great
authority in the area, but without the British flag to legitimize his
position his power will be severely undermined.
In his paternalistic way
he feels that the Malays will suffer without his guidance, and this accounts
for his determination to keep control of "his" river.
The fact that the
Malays are negotiating with the Arabs to break his monopoly merely confirms
him in his belief that they are just rnisguided primitives who cannot perceive
their best interests.
But in the first two novels the complicated political manipulations
and Lingard's part in these serve only as a detailed backdrop for the personal
experiences of Almayer and Willems.
These books are not as stylistically or
structurally sound as Conrad's mature works:
for Paul L. Wiley the elaborate
description of tropical vegetation tends to smother the plot because, coupled
with the multiplicity of character, incident, and background detail, it
helps create "a confused impression on first reading.,,48
Vernon Young
thinks that "the serpentine sentences and adjectival urgency of the Conrad
world," while contributing to the cumulative impressionistic effect, too
often blunt the reader's interest level.
49
But, despite such objections,
these early works do reveal, through Conrad's intense concentration on the
47
Jerry Allen, The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad (New York, 1965),
p. 223.
48
Conrad's Measure of Man (lst Ed., 1954; New York, 1966), p. 34.
49"Lingard's Folly: The Lost Subject," The Kenyon Review, 15
(1953), 522-39. Almayer's Folly contains numerous examples of the ornate
style that offends Young. In describing trees Conrad writes, "And in the
midst of them the merciless creepers clung to the big trunks in cable-like
coils, leaped from tree to tree, hung in thorny festoons from the lower
boughs, and, sending slender tendrils on high to seek out the smallest
branches, carried death to their victims in an exulting riot of silent
destruction."
21
psychological agonies of the main characters, the concerns that would
dominate his thought throughout his career:
the difficulties of individuals
isolated in alien communities and the false values surrounding the concept
of the white man's burden that help to destroy them.
AlI the major thematic elements of Almayer's Folly are present
on its first page:
Almayer's thoughts were often busy with goldi gold he had
failed to securei gold the others had secured - dishonestly,
of course - or gold he meant to secure yet, through his own
honest exertions, for himself and Nina. He absorbed himself
in his dream of wealth and power away from this coast where
he had dwelt for so many years, forgetting the bitterness
of toil and strife in the vision of a great and splendid
reward. They would live in Europe, he and his daughter.
They would be rich and respected. Nobody would think of
her mixed blood in the presence of her great beauty and
of his immense wealth. 50
This passage states clearly how much Almayer hates his existence and his
racist attitude towards his daughter's half-Malay ancestry.
And it also
shows that Almayer is willing to endure a situation he detests because of
his greed for gold.
If he strikes it rich he and his daughter can lead a
splendid life in Europe, far from the depressing rigours of colonial
existence. 51
Because of his desire for gain Almayer has placed himself
entirely in Lingard's power.
For despite his racial prejudicies he has
married Lingard's captured Malay "daughter" in anticipation of the material
benefits such a match promises.
Lingard's encouragement of the liaison
50
Joseph Conrad, Almayer's Folly (New York, 1925), p. 3. AlI
subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parenthesés in the
text.
5lHere we see the central theme of Nostromo foreshadowed in miniature. Almayer hopes that the accumulation of gold will produce a settled
life for him and Nina, just as Charles Gould sees the control of material
interests as a stabilizing force in the life of Costaguana. By the time
Conrad wrote Nostromo his artistry was such that he could show the effects
of a thirst for profit on a society-wide scale.
22
is as crude as Almayer's motives:
Nobody will see the colour of your wife's skin. The dollars
are too thick for that, l tell you! And mind you, th~will
be thicker yet before l die. There will be millions, Kaspar!
Millions l say! (p. 10).
Almayer is not too concerned about his new marital responsibilities,
however, because "while swearing fidelity, he was concocting plans for
getting rid of the pretty Maly girl in a more or less distant future"
(p. 23).
It is at this point that Conrad first introduces the white man's
burden theme.
He mentions how Almayer's bride
had retained enough of conventual teaching to understand
weIl that according to white men's law she was going to
be Almayer's companion and not his slave, and promised
to herself to act accordingly (p. 23).
Conrad exposes Almayer and Lingard by juxtaposing their commercial attitudes
with the white standards they are supposed to be observing.
And he
increases the effect of this contrast by ironically letting the awareness
of these standards issue from the Malay girl.
As the action proceeds Conrad rapidly places Almayer in a more
and more isolated position.
His material security is threatened when the
Arabs undermine Lingard's trading monopoly; his wife becomes hostile to
him and white standards and demonstrates her antagonism by periodically
smashing the household furnishings "in her unreasoning hate of those signs
of civilization" (p. 26).
Finally, Lingard disappears and Almayer's main
link with the white world is truncated.
He is now left alone with his
daughter, and aIl his thoughts are concentrated on escaping with her
from the jungle environment.
Almayer is obviously unfit to bear the
responsibilities of the burden since he is motivated antirely by greed
23
and
"
d~sl~kes
,52
t h e na t~ves.
Although he pays lip service to white
principles these never guide his actions in any meaningful way.
this hypocrisy that turns his daughter against him.
It is
She is attracted to
Dain not only because of his personableness, but also because the behaviour
of the Malays does not, unlike that of the whites, contradict their words:
The savage and uncompromising sincerity of purpose shown by
her Malay kinsmen seemed at least preferable to the sleek
hypocrisy, to the poli te disguises, to the virtuous pretences
of such white people as she had the misfortune to come in
contact with (p. 43).
She constantly criticizes this willingness on her father's part to overlook
his professed standards:
"Only a few days ago you were selling the powder
of their destruction; now you want to give up to them the man that yesterday
--~---
you called your friend" (p. 181).
"I am not of your race.
In the end she rejects whites entirely:
Between your people and me there is also a
barrier that nothing can remove" (p. 179).
Thus Conrad shows Almayer
losing the only person he really cares about because of his false values.
The main way in which Conrad conveys Almayer's steady disintegration is by precise analysis of his psychological state.
chosen diction on the first page starts this process.
The carefully
Almayer "absorbed
himself in his dream of wealth," in a "vision of a great and splendid
reward."
This is the source of Almayer's disaster.
He lives in a world
52 Jim , whose predicament is similar to Almayer's, faces it with
much loftier ideals. He has no economic designs on the natives but seems
to selflessly want to help them. Hisdifferent attitudes probably originate in his parsonage background whichfavoured the growth of missionary
ideas. But, as shall be seen, his seeming devotion to the white man's
burden is only of secondary importance in his life.
24
of drearns and visions that render him incapable of coming to grips with
the social reality around him.
53
It is this escapist tendency that Conrad
continually stresses in describing Almayer.
He constantly emphasizes the
contradiction between Almayer's drearn world and the surrounding material
one, usually with ironie effect.
For instance, after Lingard deserts him
Almayer has to turn to the Malays in order to pur sue his drearn of wealth.
But while expecting them to help him, he sus tains his arrogant white
attitude towards them:
Surely Dain was not thinking of playing him false. It was
absurdo Dain and Lakamba were both too much interested in
the success of his sdheme. Trusting to Malays was poor
work; but then even Malays have some sense and understand
their own interest (p. 14).
In terms of the white man's burden his dilemma is clear:
he fails to
promulgate white standards and to apply these by helping the Malays; and
he does not even use them as a personal behavioural guide.
Since he loses
sight of the white man's code but has contempt for the jungle community,
he is totally isolated from any social reality and retreats further and
further into his private world.
Almayer differs from Jim in this respect.
Jim is also obsessed by his romantic fantasies.
But at the sarne time he
is not so pathetic as Almayer because he does function for a long time as
a successful member of Patusan society.
Because of his desire for white
esteem Jim follows the dicta of the burden, but no matter what his motives
Conrad shows him to be better off than Almayer who has no spiritual or
practical support from any source.
Conrad seems to suggest that unless
one follows some sort of social code in the jungle - and that of the burden
53Ted E. Boyle comments that "Almayer's drearn is comparable to
Jim's, in that it prevents him from immersing himself in thé-- real world."
See Symbol and Meaning in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Tne Hague, 1965),
p. 20.
25
is most relevant to the situation - personal disintegration will result.
Even as he prepares the practical details of the expedition to search for
the gold Almayer sinks deeper into mmself:
For the last fortnight Almayer was absorbed in the preparations,
walking among his workmen and slaves in a kind of waking trace,
where practical details • . • were mixed up with vivid dreams
of untold wealth, where the present misery • • . disappeared
in a gorgeous vision of a splendid future existence for himself
and Nina. He hardly saw Nina • • • He hardly took notice of
Dain . • • seemingly wishing to avoid him, bent upon forgetting
the hated reality of the present by absorbing himself in his
work, or else by letting his imagination soar (pp. 62-63).
The world of his fantasy is so immeasurably richer than anything reality
can provide that it is no wonder inertia steadily overcomes his con crete
plans and leaves him passively immersed in his .dreams:
"With tin spoon
in his hand, he was forgetting the plateful of ri ce before him in the
fanciful arrangement of sorne splendid banquet to take place on his arrivaI
in Amsterdam" (p. 65).
Almayer is a victim of a corrupt form of "égoisme."
no social restraints or commitmentsi
own interests.
54
He observes
but thinks only of furthering his
This is seen most clearly in his relations with his
daughter, the one whom he supposedly loves most.
to be rich; l wanted to get away from here.
He tells her, "I wanted
l wanted to see white men
bowing low before the power of your beauty and your wealth" (p. lOI).
see his total selfishness.
We
He wants to succeed in his plans only so that
he can show off Nina like an ornament to white society.
Fittingly enough,
it is she who forces him to face the truth of his ambitions:
You wanted me to dream your dreams, to see your own visions the visions of life amongst the white faces of those who cast
me out from their midst in angry contempt. But while you
spoke l listened to the voice of my own self (p. 179).
54"Égoisme" is a characteristic of the romantic, one who wishes
to escape his material situation. Although both Almayer and Jim are
--escapists, Almayer 1 s desires are coarsely materialistic while Jim 1 sare
more abstracto
26
Here Conrad subtly presents another, positive forro of "égoisme" to help
us see Almayer's in its proper perspective.
Nina asserts her individuality
and rejects her father's corrupt standards.
This frees her and allows her
to go 0ff with Dain whom she respects.
But her move does not plunge her
into anarchy, because she substitutes the more honest values of Malay
society for the hypocritical white ones.
Almayer, although he succeeds
in avoiding the responsible side of the white man's burden, still works
within the framework of the code because his actions are deterroined by
its racist underpinnings.
His "égoisme" is incompletely expressed, unlike
Kurtz's, because he fails to free himself of false social standards.
Conrad
clarifies this at the end when, with cruel irony, he describes how Almayer
wants to stop Nina's flight but cannot do so because his racist feelings
prevent him:
'I am a white man, and of good farnily. Very good family, ,
he repeated, weeping bitterly. 'It would be a disgrace
• • • aIl over the island, • • . the only white man on
the east coastl No, it cannot be
white men finding
my daughter with this Malay.' (p. 184. Conrad's
punctuation) •
After this, before sinking into his last opium trance, Almayer tries to
ease his anguish over Nina by blotting her out of his consciousness:
"That
was his idea of his dutY to himself - to his race - to his respectable
connections; to the whole universe unsettled and shaken by this frightful
catastrophe of his life" (p. 192).
Here he pitifully gropes for comfort
towards sorne half-remernbered thoughts about the white man's burden, never
realizing that these were the source of his destruction.
Critics tend to see Willems not as a variation of Almayer but
27
as a foreshadowing of Jim.
55
The linkage is justified not only because
of the obvious concrete parallels, but also because, within An Outcast
of the Islands, Conrad is careful to show that his first two protagonists
are meant to be entirely different types.
t~e
Conrad places them together in
same situation and shows how their personalities clash:
Willems
considers Almayer a degenerate failurei Almayer fears that Willems is
supplanting him as Lingard's favourite and will benefit from the fortune
that Almayer considers rightfully his.
The distinction between the two
is important because it is sustained on the psychological level:
willems'
consciousness of his situation is more acute than Almayer's and this
increases the intensity of his suffering.
Almayer is abandoned in Sambir
and hates it, but almost until the end he is supported by the hope, false
as it is, that he will make a successful return to white society.
His
fantasy world insulates him from reality so weIl that he never achieves
the state of self-recognition.
But Willems has no such illusions to blunt
his perception of what takes place around him.
He is not a victim of his
own fantasies, for his problems are concrete ones that stem from his
difficult relationship with social groups.
At the start of the book he is at his peak, enjoying his commercial
success and his sense of power in lording it over his wife and relatives:
"He did not analyse the state of his mind, but probably his greatest delight
lay in the unexpressed but intimate conviction that, should he close his
550ther Conrad characters in a similar predicament as Willems
are Kurtz and, for the short time Almayer and Willems are together, Kayerts
and Carlier. But the Willems-Jim connection is definitely strongest: Both
are ostracized by white society, both are placed in a jungle community by
father figures, both love native girls.
28
hand, aIl those adrniring human beings would starve."
56
The problem of
the white man's burden is immediately introduced, for Willems' relationship to his family is a microcosm of the white colonist's position in
backward areas:
he plays the part of a benevolent despot, helping his
relatives because this increases his domination over them.
careful to emphasize what brings about Willems' downfall.
Conrad is
It is not his
actions towards the natives that ruin him but, as in the case of Jim, his
transgression against white rules.
regard to Willems.
Conrad is more ironical about this in
He explains how Willems made his mark with Hudig by
"the quiet deal in Opiuni the illegal traffic in gunpowderi the great
affair of smuggled firearms" (p. 8).
As long as his shady activities were
restricted to exploiting blacks for the profit of whites Willems was a
respected memher of colonial society.
Only when he adopted the same
principles for use against whites was he disgraced.
Through Willems'
experience Conrad thoroughly exposes the double standards of whites in the
tropics and makes clear their racist base.
After his crime is discovered Willems suffers a type of enforced
self-awareness because "he came out of himself, out of his selfishness out of the constant preoccupation of his interests and his desires - out
of the temple of self and the concentration of personal thought" (pp. 30-31).
Here Conrad uses the concept of "égoisme" ironically.
Willems suddenly sees
himself in relation to white standards, but only after he has violated them.
56
Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (New York, 1925),
AlI subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.
p. 5.
29
This perception makes him despair:
"For the first time in his life he
felt afraid of the future, because he had lost his faith, the faith in
his own success" (p. 31).
Willems feels he is "the outcast of aIl mankind"
(p. 30), and rightly so, because even when he arrives in sambir he is as
unpopular here as in white society.
Almayer is antagonistic to him and
his strange appearance scares the native children and even frightens the
animaIs (p. 66).
Willems is left with a sense of utter frustration:
"The
man who, during long years, became accustomed to think of himself as indispensable to others, felt a bitter and savage rage at the cruel consciousness of his superfluity, of his uselessness" (p. 65).
frame of mind that he meets Aissa.
It is while in this
In her presence "Willems felt soothed
and lulled into forgetfulness of his past, into indifference as to his
future" (p. 74).
By concentrating on "the luminous fact of her existence"
(p. 76) he blots out his frustration and seems to resolve his problem of
isolation.
Unfortunately, his satisfaction is short-lived because his
affair with Aissa also increases his awareness of white society's standards,
continuing the process that began with his misdemeanour:
appointed with himse1f.
"He was dis-
He seemed to be surrendering to a wild creature
the unstained purity of his life, of his race, of his civilization.
He had
a notion of being lost amongst shapeless things that were dangerous and
ghastly" (p. 80).
It is this conflict between WillemS' passion and his
know1edge of "proper" white behaviour that Conrad sus tains for the rest
of the nove!.
It is this that turns him against her, not that he "loses
interest in Aissa' s sexuali ty. ,,57
57
He starts to judge her cri tically: _
Thomas Moser, Joseph Conrad:
1957; Hamden, Conn., 1966), p. 56.
Achievement and Decline (lst Ed.,
30
She was too different from him. He was so civilizedl It
struck him suddenly that they had nothing in common - not
a thought, not a feeling~ he could not make clear to her
the simplest motive of any act of his (p. 128).
This situation foreshadows the one in Lord Jim.
For, like Jim, Willems
-of
worries about being the representativeof the "civilized" values
society that has rejected him.
pathetic sort of self-awareness.
tbe
Conrad constantly stresses Willems:'
His knowledge of white standards
increases with his Sambir experience, but he fails to realize that to
adhere to these in his situation means ruine
It is against his best
interests to adopt white man's burden values - that part of the code
that warns against too intense involvement with natives - because since
his society has banished him his only hope for a meaningful life is with
Aissa.
He wants her desperately, but since, unwittingly, his responses
are circumscribed by the dogrilas of the burden, they are unable to meet
on a full human level.
Willems fails to overcome his problem, but he does grope towards
a solution by seeing his relationship with Aissa in social terms.
He
consciously disapproves of the social framework they exist within:
He was carried away by the flood of hate, disgust, and
contempt of a white man for that blood which is not his
blood, for that race which is not his race~ for the brown
skins~ for the hearts false like the sea, blacker than night.
This feeling of repulsion over-mastered his reason in a
clear conviction of the impossibility for him to live with
her people (p. 152).
If the chance exists he wants to return with her to white society where
he will still be able to possess her but where his racism will be legitimized by the social structure.
But Aissa out-manoeuvers him.
She knows
the inferior position she will have among whites, so she wants to keep him
31
isolated in the jungle where his white attitudes will eventually be eroded
away.
This determination to keep him in Sambir makes her manipulate him
into betraying Lingard, thus threatening his remaining ties with whites.
In this last section of the book Conrad sus tains his emphasis
on the white man's burden theme.
Lingard is the classic representative
of this with
his deep-seated and immovable conviction that only he - he,
Lingard - knew what was good for them [the natives] • • •
He would make them happy whether or no~ he said, and he meant
it. His trade brought prosperity to the young state, and the
fear of his heavy hand secured its internaI peace for many
years (p. 200).
Oddly enough, Lingard does not seem to feel personal animosity towards
Willems for his betrayal, but sees it in terms of the burden:
"The
picture of Willems ranging over the islands and disturbing the harmony of
the universe by robbery, treachery, and violence, held him silent, entranced,
painfully spellbound" (p. 209).
Willems is a danger because he might upset
the region's social order and jeopardize white control.
is so impersonal in planning willems' punishment.
This is why Lingard
He thinks of it as a
"sacred duty" (p. 234) because Willems, in creating colonial disorder,
broke the white code, just as"he broke the law against embezzling when he
was in Macassar.
Willems tries to explain the torment he has suffered in
being cast out of white society while at the same time being expected to
uphold its standards:
"I was alone in that infernal savage crowd.
delivered into their hands.
l was
After the thing was done, l felt so lost and
weak that l would have called the devil himself to my aid if it had been
any good" (p. 274).
Lingard is unimpressed.
He condemns Willems to remain
in Sambir, the cruelest fa te possible under the circumstances.
32
The callousness of Lingard's judgment is Conrad's implicit
condemnation of the white man's burden.
Lingard is ultimately responsible
for Willems'destruction since he first sent him to Sambir and finally
,
,
h'1m t h ere. 58
1mpr1sons
ness of his humanity:
His reasons for doing this attest to the narrow"Nobody will be able to throw any of your villanies
in my teethi nobody will be able to point at you and say, 'Here goes a
scoundrel of Lingard's up-bringing.'
You are buried here"
(p. 277).
Lingard is obviously concerned primarily with his own reputation.
Aside
from the profit, his main motivation in being an apostle of the burden is
" a se If-sus t"
"
a1n1ng grat1'f"1cat'10n ,,59,1n dom1nat1ng
peop l
es' l'1ves.
At th e
beginning of the book Willems was like this, too, but his experiences strip
him of this attitude.
Lingard, however, is never forced to question his
faith in the white man's mission because he is able to use Willems as his
scapegoat.
Since he is never called upon to test the values of the burden
he can continue to adhere to them, blandly convinced that Willems was a
misfit whose personal weaknesses caused aIl his problems.
But Conrad's
sympathy runs counter to this, for he shows that Willems' isolation from
a familiar
socia~
structure and the spurious principles of the burden were
the true source of his disaster.
58This is
the other Europeans
ing on criminality"
the executioner and
59
in opposition to Fleishman's view that except for Lingard
in Conrad's first two books are "moral desperados verg(p. 87). Such a statement fails to distinguish between
his victims.
Gurko, Joseph Conrad:
Giant in Exile, p. 51.
33
IV - "AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS" AND "HEART OF DARKNESS"
Conrad mentions that
lightest part of the loot
l
Ir, An
outpost of Progress' [1897] is the
carried off from Central Africa, the main
portion being of course 'The Heart of Darkness' [1899].,,60
Because the
inspiration for both stories came fram the same set of experiences cri tics
often see the shorter pièce as a "cold adumbration,,61 or "an outline,,62
f or t h e l onger.
't
' te
Wh1'le t h'1S 1S
rue'1n many par t'1CU l ars, 63 t h
e ult1ma
effect of the two works is dissimilar.
In the earlier one Conrad establishes
a scene of physical and moral decay and links this with the ideology of the
white man's burden to examine the disintegration of the two traders.
He
then expands this action into a broader social context by showing that the
civilization that produced them was responsible for the
~en's
destruction:
"They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose
existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of
civilized crowds" (p. 89).
64
Society had taught them how to function
through "the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals"
(p. 89) and how to behave by "the power of its police and of its opinion"
60 see the Author's Note to Tales of Unrest (New York, 1925), p. ix.
61
Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, p. 64.
62
Boyle, Symbol and Meaning in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, p. 90.
63 such as the greed for ivory, the resemblance of the names Kayerts
and Kurtz, the appearance of fog at a climactic moment, and Carlier's thought
about "the necessity of exterminating aIl the niggers" (p. 108) which foreshadows Kurtz's.
64
117.
Joseph Conrad, "An Outpostof progress," Tales of Unrest, pp. 86AlI references are to this edition and are in parentheses in the texte
34
(p. 89).
Society "had taken care of those two men, forbidding them aIl
independent thought, aIl initiative, aIl departure from routine, and
forbidding it under pain of death" (p. 91).
In the jungle, without social
controls, Kayerts and Carlier are left not knowing how to behave.
This
situation and those responsible for creating it are the targets of Conrad's
satire.
At the start the two traders are unaware of their vulnerability.
They see themselves hemmed in by the menacing jungle but fail to realize
that their main enemy is not natural but human.
Their native assistant,
"taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men" (p. 86).
Even
worse is the "ruthless and efficient" (p. 87) director of the company who
to their face pontificates about "the promising aspect of their station"
(p. 87) but after he leaves comments, "I always thought the station on
this river useless, and they just fit the station!" (p. 88).
This practice
of trading companies, in dumping men down ID jungle areas with no concern
for their welfare or that of the inhabitants as long as a few tusks are
accumulated, inspires Conrad's contempt.
The hanging Kayerts, sticking
his tongue out at the director at the end of the story, is Conrad's gruesome
comment on this entire commercial process.
65
And since the white man's
burden helps to justify this, Conrad,' treats i t wi th equal harShness.
The conscious application of the burden's principles is nonexistent, for Kayerts and Carlier are even less aware of them than Almayer
65Both the company and Kayerts and Carlier are motivated by
economic greed. But Conrad is careful to distinguish between the individuals
and the organization. The two men have been forced into the jungle in order
to make ends meet: Kayerts to raise a dowry for his daughter; Carlier
because he has been discharged from the army and has been unable to find any
other work. Conrad seems aware of Cecil Rhodes' view of the colonies as a
safety valve to ease possible social dis content in the mother country caused
by economic hardship.
35
and Willems, and no one like Lingard enters the picture.
But the important
difference between the story and the novels is that Conrad de-emphasizes
the psychological reactions of his protagonists and concentrates primarily
on the social causes of their predicament.
Almayer and Willems are ob-
viously victirns of social circurnstances, but they suffer greatly because
they have personal problems with people they love.
But Kayerts and Carlier
are simply thrown together and develop no close ties to involve them on the
personal level.
In fact, they show concern for each other only through
fear of being alone.
More important, they do not initiate the incident
that ruins them, unlike Almayer and Willems who do make major decisions
that deterrnine their fate.
But it is Makola who sells the blacks into
·
to a l ter t h e
s l avery an d t h e two tra d ers can d 0 no th ~ng
e.
.
transact~on.
66
They are forced to respond to a new social situation which forrns without
· d'~rect consent. 67
th e~r
By allowing the men's predicament to evolve the
way he does Conrad comments sharply on the white man's burden.
naturally enough, is guided by no such concept.
he knows about the representatives
hunger for ivory.
cr
The only certain thing
the Great Trading Company is their
Kayerts and Carlier are not particularly energetic
traders, and he war.ns Kayerts, "Station in very bad order, sir.
will growl.
Makola,
Director
Better get a fine lot of ivory, then he say nothing" (p. 101).
66NO reasons are given for Makola's dislike of the men. Unlike
Babalatchi he is not interested in manipulating whites for political gain,
but only tries to stay out of their way as much as possible. He is like
Mrs. Almayer, Nina, and Aissa, whose attitude to whites is nearly always
one of suspicious mistrust.
67 The seriousness of this is'only fully comprehended when one
realizes that they were dependent on ihe people who were sold for their
supplies, and that their final confrontation arises from a petty squabble
over food.
36
The whites seem to agree, so Makola trades men for tusks.
The traders
are shocked but soon accept the barter as irreversible and calculate their
percentages, aIl the time villifying Makola's barbarity.
Conrad's intention
here is to show that Makola, in fulfilling the desires of the whites in so
direct a fashion, contravenes the white man's burden code which insists
that economic gain must be obtained only in conjunction with a pretended
benevolence.
In Conrad's dour vision of imperialism any inhumanity is
possible as long as an altruistic rationale for it can be constructed.
But this is precisely why Kayerts and Carlier disintegrate so rapidly after
the deed:
because of Makola's hastiness they are unable to avoid facing
the fact that they are implicated in slave dealing.
Since they cannot
soften their moral revulsion with an ideological cushion they are soon
unable to function.
Conrad is careful to show how, before the exchange,
the pair obtain a superficial awareness of the burden from the old newspaper article they find called "Our Colonial Expansion" which "spoke much
of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civiliizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light,
and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth" (p. 94).
After
reading this they "began to think better of themselves" (p. 95).
Carlier
straightens the cross on their predecessor's grave and their existence
, a new measure
seems to ga1n
0
f d'19n1ty.
,
68
But after Makola's action the y
68conrad's beautifully functional symbolism should be noted. The
physical decrepitude of the station is noticeable from the beginning, and
now Conrad shows this decay reflected on the moral level, tying it precisely
to the white man's burden. The rotting newspaper sustains the aspect of
physical decay but also, since it is long out of date, suggests that its
message is passé and ir.r::elevant to the particular situation of the men. The
straightening of the cross symbolizes the men's attempt to associate themselves with the supposed "sacredness" of the burden, but since the cross
is planted over a grave and eventually serves as Kayerts' gibbet, Conrad
leaves no doubts about the futility of their action.
37
are unable to reconcile slave dealing with the "sacredness of the
civilizing work," and living with this contradiction erodes the small
amount of confidence the article had generated in them and hastens their
final conflict.
In terms of ConLad's social philosophy Kayerts' and Carlier's
sense of self has been stunted, and there is no spark of "égoisme" left
within them to respond to the demands of their environment.
Wa perceive
them as helpless victims, misguided by their society's standards and
deceived in their expectations, and a sense of pitY is our basic attitude
to them.
But in "Heart of Darkness", through the figure of Kurtz, Conrad
describes an entirely different response to a sjmilar situation.
For the
first time in his art Conrad investigates in aIl its complexity the relationship between individual aspirations and social responsibility.
In "An
Outpost of ProgressIf the analysis of the trader's plight remains on one
level, since it is seen only in sociological terms.
This is why, in com-
paring it to "Heart of Darkness", Conrad considered it the "lightest"
expression of his African experience.
In "Heart of Darkness" social values
are also of prime importance, but Conrad uses them in a different_,way.
He sustains his view of what society expects from the individual, but at
the same time he shows Kurtz reacting against this forcefully, in a way
the two traders never do.
Although Kurtz destroys himself in the long run,
his determination not to allow his "égoisme" to be squelched pushes him to
a level of self-awareness that Kayerts and Carlier never approach.
is the key difference between the two stories.
This
Kayerts and Carlier are
38
oblivious to the forces grinding them down, but Kurtz is extremely
conscious of the difficulty of his situation.
His keener perceptions
make him respond to it in a more complex way than Kayerts and Carlier,
and what Marlow learns from his reactions and conveys to the reader
account for the richer artistic texture of Kurtz's experiences.
The story also has a symbolic complexity that "An Outpost of
Progress" never approaches.
It has been variously describeo as lia grail
quest,,69 and "the traditional voyage into Hades.,,70
Robert O. Evans
finds a "close structural parallel between the "Heart of Darkness" and
the Inferno"
71
and Albert Guerard sees it as "the night journey into
.
,,72
th e unconscl.Ous.
The story is rich enough to absorb all of the above
interpretations, and more besides, but any analysis which neglects to take
into account the emotions that generated the work fails to do full justice
to Conrad's artistic intent.ions.
Conrad himself describes how, when his
boyhood dream of sailing up the Congo was realized, the experience was
ruined for him by "the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper 'stunt'
and the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that
ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical
69
Jerome Thale, "Marlow's Quest," University of Toronto Quarterly,
(July, 1955), 351-358.
70Lillian Feder, "Marlow's Descent into Hell," Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 9 (March, 1955), 280-92.
71
"Conrad's Underworld," Modern Fiction studies, 2 (May, 1956),
56-62.
72
Conrad the Novelist, p. 39.
39
exploration. ,,73
This reaction of Conrad's is central to an understanding
of "Heart of Darkness," because before anything else the work is an attack
on imperialism and the concept of the white man's burden which helped to
' "
1 egl.tl.ml.ze
l.' t . 74
As we have previously seen, Conrad was a British chauvinist, but
at the same time he also detested the aggressive forro imperialism was taking
in his time.
He felt that any attempt to "civilize" through force was
bound to end in disaster.
Marlow is the spokesman for this view in the
'9arly stages of "Heart of Darkness."
He is consistently sarcastic about
the colonial behaviour of the European nations because it is based on pettyminded greed and sustained by force.
75
In his opening anecdote he puts this
73
Joseph Conrad, "Geography and Some Explorers," Last Essays
(New York, 1926), 1-21. The 'stunt l Conrad refers to was H.M. Stanley's
1874-77 Congo expedition which was sponsored by various newspapers. From
1879 onward King Leopold used stanley as publicity agent to whitewash his
activities in the Congo Free State, and also to establish a chain of
trading stations in the Congo basin, the basis for the "scramble for loot"
that Conrad detested so much.
74 .
Conrad's letter to William Blackwood, his publisher, written
on Dec. 31, 1898, while the story was still in progress, verifies this.
Conrad writes, "The title l am thinking of is "The Heart of Darkness" but
the narrative is not gloomy. The criminality of inefficiency and pure
selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa is a j~stifiable
idea. The subject is of our time distinctly." See William Blackburn (ed.),
Joseph Conrad: Letters to william Blackwood and David S. Meldrum (Durham,
North Carolina, 1958), p. 37.
75
-
"Heart of Darkness" differs from "An Outpost of progress" in
this respect. To match the passivity of the traders and the general
atmosphere of disintegration he was trying to convey Conrad does not
stress imperialism's forceful tactics in the earlier story.
40
process into historical perspective by condemning Roman imperialism:
was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale."
"It
76
He describes how his predecessor in the Belgian Congo was killed in an
absurd squabble over two hens while "engaged in the noble cause, you know"
(p. 63).
He ridicules the German zone where "the jolly pioneers of progress
drink the jolly lager beer" (p. 65).
And when he sees the French man-of-
war fi ring into the jungle he thinks there is "a touch of insanity in the
proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight" (p. 69).
In
Marlow's view Britain's colonial policy has, for the most part, avoided
the grotesque bungling of other European powers:
effiency - the
only.
devotio~
"What saves us is
to efficiency • • . What redeems it is the idea
An idea at the back of iti not a sentimental pretence but an ideai
and an unselfish belief in the idea down before, and offer a sacrifice to
soro~thing
you can set up, and bow
" (p. 61).
Here Marlow utters
the official view of the British government on its foreign policy at the
end of the nineteenth-century.77
He expresses similar approval when he
looks at the map in the company office and remarks about the British
territo:r:ies, "one knows that sorne real work is done in there" (p. 65).
Marlow's narration of the first phases of his journey is an
Englishman's descriptive catalogue of the results of foreign imperialism.
When he lands at the company's first station he comments on the wasteful
76
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (New
York, 1950), p. 61. AlI subsequent refere~ces are to this edition and
are in pare~theses in the text.
77
.
For example, Lord Curzon, viceroy of India from 1898-1905,
proclaimed in a Birmingham address on Dec. Il, 1907 that, "Imperialism
is animated by the supreme idea, without which it is on1y as sounding brass
and a tinkling cymba1, viz., the sense of sacrifice and the idea of duty • "
See "Imperialism in Action," History of the 20th Century, 12 (1969), 310311.
41
inefficiency of the place:
a discarded boiler and an upturned railway
truck lie about along with rusty rails, machine parts, and broken drainage
pipes.
This "wanton smashup" (p. 72) irks his practical English sensibility
and symbolizes the destructiveness of imperialism.
Also, here he witnesses
for the first time the human wreckage created by imperialism's brutal
methods.
He sees a chain gang controlled by an armed guard and a grove
of dying workers:
This was the place where sorne of the helpers had withdrawn to die.
They were dying slowly - it was very clear. They were not enemies,
they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing
but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in
the greenish gloom (p. 73).
Marlow is "horror-struck" (p. 73), but before he has time to really reflect
on the scene he meets the dapper figure of the chief accountant.
The man's
elegant appearance strikes Marlow as "that of a hairdresser' s dummy" (p. 74),
but despite this Marlow says, "I respected the fellow.
Yesj l respected
his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair • • . In the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance.
That's backbone.
His
starched collars and got-up shirt fronts were achievements of character"
(p. 74).
From this point forward we realize that, until he meets Kurtz,
Marlow's perception is limited by his belief that a devotion to efficiency
is the most important attribute for men in the jungle.
Although he deplores
the wretched existence of the black workers, since he is in non-British
territory he is not really surprised by it.
What does surprise him is to
meet someone who seems to display a British "stiff-upper-lip" type ability
to get things done despite the fact that "Everything else in the station
was in a muddle" (p. 74).
This acceptance of businesslike competence as
42
the supreme virtue is what distinguishes Conrad's voice from Marlow's,
for Conrad shows how this prevents his protagonist from seeing beneath
the surface organization of things.
For when Marlow asks the accountant
how he manages to look so neat the man explains, "r've been teaching one
of the native women about the station.
distaste for the work" (p. 74).
It was difficult.
She had a
Thus Conrad subtly shows how the tidy
appearance Marlow admires is the result of the forced labour of a black
woman, and this links it to the other exploitative functions of the station.
But Marlow does not see this.
He responds to the obvious brutality of the
chain gang and the death grove, but for him the accountant is somehow not
directly connected with these.
To him the man is bearing up with a British-
like fortitude, and his only coroment about the accountant's "training" his
laundress is, "this man had truly accomplished something" (p. 74).
Marlow's seemingly narrow
~ision
at this stage of his journey
is Conrad's first hint of the man's need for some sort of moral support.
He admires the accountant because he represents familiar social values
that indicate to Marlow a possible way of dealing with the turmoil around
him.
He sees that adhering to the rules of conduct society has bred into
one is a means of obtaining personal stability in the face of a savage and
threatening environment.
Marlow needs something to hang on to as more
atrocities are revealed on his overland journey:
natives, drunken soldiers.
abandoned villages, dead
He even employs some of imperialism's coercive
tactics himself when he threatens his refractory carriers in order to quell
their rebelliousness:
"r made a speech in English with gestures, not one
43
of which was lost to the sixtY pairs of eyes before me" (p. 76).
But
after he regrets the incident because he realizes he is adopting the same
Qespicable measures as the foreign traders.
He is frightened by his action
and remembers how the company doctor warned him that the jungle causes
'!mental changes" (p. 77) and avoiding tension is the only antidote.
Marlow
realizes the journey is telling on his nerves and he comments wryly, "I
felt l was becoming scientifically interesting" (p. 77).
He arrives at
the Central station and meets the same futile disorder and mercenary
attitudes that have dogged his entire trip.
His ship is a wreck and the
atmosphere of the station is permeated by one thing:
r~~g
in the air, was whispered, was sighed.
praying to it.
"The word 'ivory'
You would think they were
A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it aIl, like a
whiff from sorne corpse"
(p. 79).
The "pilgrims" thirst for profit seems
ludicrous to Marlow because "the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared
speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil
or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion"
(p. 80).
Their imperialist greed seems petty to Marlow because it will
not help them contend with the surrounding force of nature.
Unlike the
accountant they are not trying to preserve themselves by upholding civilized
rules.
Because of their greed they are forgetting aIl restraints, and
this tendency towards anarchy makes them vulnerable to the larger chaos
around them.
Marlow can stand the surrounding stupidity no longer.
With
"mental changes" threatening him he decides he must engross himself entirely
in the salvage of his ship in order to blot out the surrounding ugliness:
44
"1 went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that
station.
In that way only it seemed to me
redeeming facts of life" (p. 79).
l
could keep my hold on the
Like the accountant, he immerses
himself in the immediate task before him and this allows him to keep
functioning without being overwhelmed by the disorder around him.
This
day to day involvement in a concrete chore saves Marlow on tha workaday
level, and at this point in the story Conrad introduces the white man's
burden theme to show him receiving moral support from another source.
The burden was mentioned earlier when Marlow described his aunt's attempt
to inspire his missionary zeal:
It appeared, however, l was also one of the Workers, with a
capital - you know. Something like an emissary of light,
something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a
lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that
time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of
aIl that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about
'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,'
till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. l
ventured to hint that the company was run for profit (p. 67).
His mocking tone shows the contempt he has for this aspect of the burden,
for he recognizes it as just an excuse for the "scramble for loot."
78
But as he plunges deeper into the jungle, as his worst suspicions about
imperialism are confirmed, he needs some sort of moral support to prevent
him breaking under the psychological strain his journey creates.
79
Besides
his immediate practical activity of repairing the ship he comes to believe
in Mr. Kurtz.
78Marlow's constant references to the traders as "pilgrims" also
shows his sarcastic attitude towards this type of "noble enterprise" (p. 88).
79He apparently is weakened by fever, too, for he mentions that
"my body was full-- only of chills" (p. 81).
45
Marlow first heard of Kurtz from the accountant who says he is a "very
remarkable person" (pp. 74-5) and that he "sends in as much ivory as aIl
the others put together" (p. 75).
The manager of the Central Station
confirms this impression by saying, "Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had,
an exceptional man, of the greatest importance to the company" (p. 79).
But what really interests Marlow is the agent's comment about Kurtz:
"He
is a prodigy . • • He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress,
and the devil knows what else" (p. 82).
Marlow looks at the surrounding
jungle and wonders, "What was in there?
l could see a little ivory coming
out from there, and l had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there" (p. 84).
This
sense of loneliness, and the detestable attitudes of the traders make
Marlow look to Kurtz as the only positive aspect of his journey.
Kurtz
is still only a faint possibility to Marlow - "He was just a word for me.
l did not see the man in the name any more than you do" (p. 84) - but his
existence at least gives Marlow the supporting belief that there is
someone in Africa not solely committed to economic exploitation.
this the object of the trip for Marlow is to see Kurtz:
After
"I was curious
to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of
sorne sort, would climb to the top after aIl and how he would set about
his work when there" (p. 89).
Marlow's diction links his attraction to Kurtz to his belief
in the efficacity of work.
He says, "I don't like work - no man does -
but l like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself.
Your own
reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know"
(p. 86).
On hearing that Kurtz at one time was returning to civilization,
46
but turned back, Marlow remarks, "Perhaps he was just simply a fine fellow
who stuck to his work for its own sake" (p. 90).
And Marlow thinks that
Kurtz's work is not gathering ivory, but spreading his "moral ideas".
manager and his uncle,
The
in a conversation Marlow overhears, scoff at this
aspect of Kurtz:
'And the pestiferous absurdity of his talk,' continued the
other; 'he bothered me enough when he was here.' "Each
station should be like a beacon on the road towards better
things, a centre for trade, of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing." Conceive you - that assl
(pp. 90-91).
For Marlow the ship "crawled towards Kurtz - exclusively" (p. 93) because
Kurtz seems to be devoting himself to this moral task.
In the jungle,
surrounded by the untamed environment and primitive people, a white man
needs "inbom strength" (p. 95) to survive.
This strength, rooted in the
standards inculcated in him by his society, can only be preserved by constant
dedication to the practical task at hand.
This concentration on "surface
truth" (p. 95) provides a man with the necessary discipline to contend with
the difficult physical terrain, and also protects him psychologically by
preventing the upsurge of "creepy thoughts" (p. 96) that might cause him
to become morbid.
While the "pilgrims" seek only personal profit and have
no self-discipline, Marlow, busy with the operation of the ship, and Kurtz,
promulgating his "moral ideas", are both involved in similar tasks because
they are helping others and also sustaining themselves.
And although Marlow
does not imagine Kurtz engaged in any sort of proselytizing work, the fact
that he conceives of him as applying "moral ideas" in sorne way shows that he
thinks Kurtz is involved with the white man's burden at sorne refined level.
We can only understand what this signifies to Marlow by recalling his views
47
on British imperialism.
This, he states, is redeemed by "an unselfish
belief in the idea" (p. 61) behind it.
Marlow, facing arduous circumstances
in the jungle, needs to believe that such an idea can exist, and Kurtz cornes
to represent for him someone who embodies it.
80
diction Conrad uses in Marlow's'opening remarks.
This is confirmed by the
The "idea" is something
"you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to ••
(p. 61).
"
We notice that Marlow's comment trails off into silence, as if
he is struck by his own words.
He sits thinking and tOit was only after a
long silence" (p. 61) that he begins his story about Kurtz.
During his
silence Marlow seems to be musing over the fact that in his choice of
imagery he has unconsciously linked the imperial "idea" with Kurtz.
He
describes the "idea" as being worthy of worship, like an idol, and this
is precisely Kurtz's role in the jungle where "he had taken a high seat
amongst the devils of the land" (p. 109) and "unspeakable rites • . •
were offered up to him" (p. 110).
Marlow never explains the nature of
this "idea" that supposedly distinguishes a beneficent type of imperialism
from ruthless exploitation.
AlI we know for sure is that the activities
of the traders repel him and the jungle scares him:
dumb thing, or wou Id it handle us?
"Could we handle that
l felt how big, how confoundedly big, was
that thing that couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as weIl" (p. 84).
Face
to face with an antagonistic "dumb thing" Marlow is afraid because he does
not quite know how to respond to its blankness and fee1s he might be overwhelmed.
His practical duties help steady him, but it is his awareness of
80Kurtz ~s
, no t Eng l'~s,
h b ut wh en th ey mee t M
l fee l
ar ow
s cI
oset0
him because he "could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been
educated partly in England, and - as he was good enough to say himself his sympathies were in the right place" (p. 110).
48
Kurtz's competence as a "universal genius" (p. 85) in ivory-gathering and
moral works that gives him the confidence that the ordeal can be survived.
If Kurtz can exist alone in the unfathomable jungle and still not lose sight
of spiritual values Marlow feels there is hope for him.
Thus, at this point,
his allegiance to Kurtz is an attempt to extract sorne meaning from the
"stillness on the face of the immensity" (p. 83) that confronts him.
But after reaching Kurtz Marlow finds his hopes have been merely
illusions.
Kurtz, far from justifying imperialism by the extent of his
good works, exploits the natives even
more ferociously than the company
by organizing aIl aspects of the jungle community solely to satisfy his
pers on al whims.
As the truth dawns on Marlow he condemns Kurtz's degeneracy
from the point of view of his work ethic.
He compares him to the dead
helmsman, someone whose lack of "inborn strength" causes him to neglect
his duty.
For Marlow the helmsman's impetuous desertion of the wheel at
a crucial moment shows that he is not guided by any sense of social responsibility and this causes his destruction:
that shutter alone.
"Poor fool!
If he had only left
He had no restraint, no restraint - just like Kcrtz -
a tree swayed by the wind" (p. 112) .81
Also, in juxtaposing the different
BIon the other hand, the cannibals aboard the ship show no
inclination to make a meal of the whites. Of this Marlow comments, "I saw
that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability,
had come into play there" (p. 100). Marlow thinks that perhaps this control
of the cannibals is the result of "how unwholesome the pilgrims looked"
(p. 101). Harold R. Collins says that Kurtz and the helmsman have "been
deprived of the restraints and consolations of a social order" and therefore
lack discipline. For him the cannibals have a strong communal bond and this
accounts for their control. He argument does not make much sense, however,
because presumably cannibalism would be a normal activity in cannibal society
so restraint in this area would not be required. See "Kurtz, the Cannibals,
and the Second-Rate Helmsman," The Western Humanities Review, 8 (Autumn,
1954), 299-310.
49
attitudes of Marlow and Kurtz Conrad dramatizes directly the two elements
of his social philosophy.
restraints.
Marlow is a spokesman for the necessity of social
He feels that when concrete social restrictions are no longer
present "you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own
capacity for faithfulness" (p. 109).
And this fàfJ.thfulness is no abstract
quality but consists of an adherence to socially inherited standards which
are manifested by "your power to devotion, not to yourself, but to an
obscure backbreaking business" (p. 110).
Marlow thought that Kurtz was
fulfilling these criteria by his dedication to the white man's burden.
Instead he finds that Kurtz has submitted .completely to an extreme form
of "égoisme".
At first Marlow does not see anything positive in this but
equates i t wi th mere selfishness:
Oh yes, l heard him.
"You should have heard him say, 'My i vory. '
'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river my - ,
everything belonged to him" (p. 109).
Kurtz is interested solely "in the
gratification of his various lusts" (p. 119) and recognizes no social
restrictions.
Because of this Marlow realizes Kurtz is incapable of re-
deeming "the idea" behind imperialism and he dissociates himself from him:
"Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine" (p. 120) .82
82Marlow rejects the agent of "the idea", but Conrad never shows
him directly condemning "the idea" itself. Only Marlow's abrupt break in his
speech about "the idea" and his thoughtful silence following this suggest
that he might be reconsidering what he said. Eloise Hay proposes that Conrad
was hesitant to criticize British imperialism because he had just become a
British citizen and did not wish to appear ungrateful to the country of his
adoption. (See Hay, p. 117). In an essay william Bysshe Stein states that
the narrator's several references to Mar1ow's Buddha-like position "gives
evidence of the self-mortification, the denial of the tyranny of physica1
matter" which, on the political leve1, imp1ies that Conrad might be using
Mar1ow's posture as a physical symbo1 to indicate his rejection of the
materialism behind imperia1ism. See "The Lotùs Posture and 'Heart of
Darkness'," Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (Winter 1956-57),167-70.
50
But Conrad complicates things by having Marlow reject this
aspect of Kurtz but at the same time move closer to him on another level.
Because he is so conscious of the need for social restrictions Marlow is
repelled by Kurtz's "égoisme".
But eventually he realizes that this is
preferable by far to the attitude of the manager who gloats over Kurtz's
situation because it will advance his career.
After talking to him Marlow
says, "It seemed to me l had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and l
turned mentally to Kurtz for relief - positively for relief" (p. 124).
Even though Kurtz's "égoisme" prevents him from shouldering the burden, at
least he is not a mere money-grubber like the other traders.
These men are
willing to perform any number of atrocities in imperialism's name as long
as they make a profit.
Marlow detests them for this and he recognizes that
Kurtz is working according to an entirely different set of standards.
Kurtz
serves only himself, and in doing so rejects both the economic and ideological
,
' l '1sm d eman d s
'
d ut1es
1mper1a
0
f h'1m. 83
'His actions isolate him from aIl
social standards, and Marlow conveys to us the harmful external effects of
trying to lead a life of pure individualism:
"This shadow looked satiated
and calm, as though for the moment it had its fill of aIl the emotions"
(p. 122).
In recognizing no authority but his own Kurtz "had kicked hirnself
loose of the earth" (p. 129), and this rejection of aIl social ties except
those that satisfy his desires means, to Marlow, that "his soul was made
Being alone in the wilderness it had looked within itself, and, by heavensl
83,
'
H1S ra1'd s f or 1VOry
were not d
one to '
ga1n f avour W1. th th e company
but occurred because he enjoyed displaying his power. Marlow reports him
saying, "This lot of i vory now is really mine. The company did not pay for
it. l collectedit myself at a very great personal risk" (p. 138). Kurtz
probably also knew that by sending back token amounts of ivory to the company
they would think aIl was well in his area and leave him alone.
51
l tell you, it had gone mad" (p. 129).
Marlow, with his work ethic based
on a social consciousness, disapproves of Kurtz's behaviour.
Yet at the
same time he states that "it was ordered l should never betray him" (p. 127).
The reasons for Marlow's seemingly irrational loyalty to Kurtz are the key
issues in the last stages of the book.
Marlow refuses to accept the
company's opinion of Kurtz as simply an exponent of "unsound method"
(p. 124).
In choosing Kurtz rather than the official view he says, "it
was something to have at least a choice of nightmares" (p. 125).
On the sirnplest level Marlow remains faithful to Kurtz because
he is sensitive to the suffering the man has endured.
necessarily increase self-knowledge.
into total apathy.
Suffering need not
Too often it only numbs an individual
But Prometheus on his crag, Job on his ash-heap, Lear
on the heath- powerful spirits questioning themselves in isolation - do
acquire new knowledge about their relationship to the world because of their
ability to endure the hardships of situations they helped to create.
is the type of resilience Marlow sees in Kurtz.
This
Unlike most men he dared to
step "over the edge" (p. 134), and although he paid for his audacity "by
innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions"
(p. 134), he had the strength to withstand his "boundary-situation,,84 long
enough to gain new perception about himself.
And this perception is trans-
mitted to Marlow who realizes that Kurtz's experiences have been valuable to
him:
"it is not my own extremity l remember best - a vision of grayness
without forro filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the
84For Paul Tillich "the human boundary-situation is encountered
when human possibility reaches its limit, when human existence is confronted
by an ultimate threat." Kurtz' s ultimate threat is his own "égoisme". See
The Protestant Era, translated by James Luther Adams (Chicago, 1948), p. 197.
52
evanescence of aIl things - even of this pain itself.
Nol
extremity that l seem to have lived through" (p. l34).
identifies himself with Kurtz.
It is his
Marlow readily
On the surface this seems to contradict
his abhorrence of Kurtz's "égoisme".
But this is not really the case when
we realize that Marlow's journey towards Kurtz has been a search for himself.
He does not coldly dismiss Kurtz as a degenerate because he sees that he,
too, might act the sarne way in a similar situation with all external controls
gone.
Kurtz represents his own potential weaknesses, just as the jungle
syrnbolizes the external chaos always threatening hurnans.
strengthens Marlow's belief in his values.
horrorl"
This awareness only
Kurtz's final vision is of "The
and for Marlow this "was an affirmation, a moral victory" (p. 134).
This is so because Kurtz's cry corroborates Marlow's view of the dangers of
"égoisme" and increases his deterrnination to uphold his moral standards.
But Kurtz's experiences have also expanded Marlow's awareness of how far
the hurnan ego will extend itself in search of its identity.
Kurtz's
fanatical individualism in trying to satisfy all his desires gives Marlow
a new view of how important is the hurnan need for fulfilinent:.
He under-
stands that Kurtz's extreme forro of "égoisme" is anarchie and self-destructive,
but that this type of yearning, searching energy is necessary in sorne degree
or an individual's life will be totally determined by social processes.
Then he will spend his time like Prufrock, forever contemplating "Do l dare
disturb the universe?"
Kurtz dared and Marlow accepts his active response
to his situation as an attempt a.t hurnan
fulfilIi1.ent~..
Marlow does not dare,
but because of Kurtz he has "peeped over the edge" (p. 134).
This gives
him a richer insight into the relationship between social values and the
53
life of the individual.
During the trip he had attempted to categorize
Kurtz according to his own social standards, specifically those of the
work ethic and the white man's burden.
He still believes in the necessity
of social controls, but now he has a broader view of the possibilities
inherent in hum an nature.
This accounts for his reactions when he returns
to the "sepulchral city" (p. 135).
He resents
The sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch
a little money from each other, to devour their infamous
cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer • . • Their bearing,
which was simply the bearing of commonplace; individuals
going about their business in the as~urance of perfect
safety, was offensive to me (p. 135).
Such mundane activities disturb Marlow because he sees that, although they
are necessary, and a result of proper social organization, they are also
dangerous because by concentrating entirely on them a person may never see
beyond his immediate social framework to fulfil" aIl his potentialities.
85
Marlow's belief in the white man's burden is dwarfed by this
complex series of reactions he has to Kurtz.
Kurtz obviously ignored aIl
the burden's tenets, but Marlow overlooks this at the end.
He stays
faithful to Kurtz and does not condemn him according to his own standards
because such judgement seems petty in the light of the awareness Kurtz has
brought him.
His evolution to this new level of tolerance is Conrad's
concluding statement about his experiences.
in Marlow's interview with the Intended.
Its final development is seen
Of this scene Conrad wrote,
85compare this to the analysis of Conrad's similar views in "An
Outpost of Progress." Also, in Marlow's opinion, his listeners, "stepping
delicately between the but cher and the policeman" (p. 109) and performing
tricks for "a half crown a tumble" ,(p. 92), are trapped in this type of
situation.
54
the interview of the man and the girl locks in - as it
were - the whole 30000 words of narrative description
into one suggestive view of a whole phase of life, and
makes of that story something quite on another plane
than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre
of Africa. 86
The Intended worships Kurtz's memory and Marlow despairs before "the faith
that was in her, before that great and saving illusion" (p. 140).
She
lives with her idealized image of Kurtz and sees. him only in personal
terms:
"He needed me!
Mel
l would have treasured every sigh, every
word, every sign, every glance" (p. 141).
expects from women.
women are.
Her attitude is one Marlow
He thinks "it's queer how out of touch with truth
They live in a world of their own, and there had never been
anything like it and never can be" (p. 67).
Also he says, "They - the
women l mean - are out of it - should be out of it.
We must help them
to stay in that beautiful world of their own" (p. 108).
chauvinism is the simplest reason for his lie.
Marlow' s male
He does not think women
are strong enough to face the truth of reality and this is why he scoffs
at but does not try to change his aunt's view of missionary work and why
he withhold's the facts from the Intended.
But this basically simple
attitude would not push the story to "another plane."
What does this is
Marlow's reaction to the Intended's pressing him to repeat Kurtz's last
words.
He thinks, "The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper
aIl around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first
whisper of a rising wind.
cannot tell her the truth.
86
'The horror! the horror! '" (p. 142).
Marlow
She is self-deluded about the nature of Kurtz,
Blackburn (ed.), Letters to William Blackwood, p. 154.
ss
and even if this were not the case Marlow doubts his ability to verbally
convey the exact nature of any experience:
"it is impossible to convey
the li fe-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which
makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence.
is impossible" (p. 84).
It
This is especially true of his association with
Kurtz which was a "nightmare," a fearsome experience but, because of the
perceptions it brought him, one which was valuable.
But now the nightmare
is over and Marlow is back in the daytime world of ordinary social life.
This is the only world available to the Intended, and to tell her how
Kurtz so totally rejected it would be telling the woman that he spurned
her too.
But he knows that she needs her personal view of Kurtz to sustain
her in her loneliness, and to tell her the facts would be truthful but
cruel.
Since Marlow feels he can only convey to her the horrible aspects
of his nightmare, devoid of its essential meaning, he lies to the Intended
and displays his kindness to her and his devotion to Kurtz.
56
v - LORD JIM"
Of aIl of Conrad's heroes Jim is the one most afflicted by a
sense of exaggerated individualisme
The examination of his inflated self-
conception is what links the two very different halves of the book.
87
The
first part is concerned entirely with Jim's limitations, his desertion of
the Patna which stems from these, and the social implications Marlow draws
from Jim's behaviour.
In the second half it is shown how these saroe
limitations affect his behaviour in Patusan.
Jim's problem is that he is
a romantic who consistently distorts his relationship to the material
reality around him.
88
This tendency took ho Id of him at an early age when
"after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had
declared •;tself.,,89
Wh'l
' t ra~n~ng
"
h
~ e ~n
e '~s
'1y d'~s t rac t e d f rom th e
eas~
activity around him and "in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget
himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light l.i.terature"
(p. 6).
He becomes chief mate of a ship "without ever having been tested
by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of
a man" (p. 10).
As mate of the Patna his duties are not exacting and this
allows him to spend much time in his fantasy world among the "dreams and
87
Conrad called this sharp division of Lord Jim (1900) into two
distinct parts the book's "plague spot" (Life and Letters, l, 298). But
although the differences in l~cale are extreme in the two sections, there
is sufficient continuity of theme to make the novel a unified work.
88Tony Tanner links him to the nineteenth-century cult of romantic
individualism, specifically to Carlyle's Great Man and Nietzsche's Superman.
Tanner places Lord Jim in the saroe genre as Don Quixote because Conrad exposes
the limitations of idealism so thoroughly. See Conrad: Lord Jim (London,
1963), pp. 7-8.
89Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (London, 1946), p.S. AIl subsequent
references are to this edition and are in parentheses in the texte
57
the success of his imaginary èchievements.
They were the best parts of
life, its secret truth, its hidden reality" (p. 20).
90
But when the ship
meets with a crisis it is this quality of living in his imagination that
freezes Jim into inaction.
His mind "evoked for him aIl the horrors of
panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped - aIl the
apalling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of" (p. 88).
He
stands unmoving, lost in "passive heroism" (p. 104), while his cowardly
shipmates rush to abandon ship.9l
But after they finally launch the life-
boat and are about to cast off, he suddenly jumps into the boat and joins
them in deserting the Patna's 800 passengers.
One would think becoming an accomplice in such a cowardly action
would destroy Jim's heroic image of himself.
But his imagination is power-
fuI enough to blockade his ego against any attempted intrusion by external
reality, and he passes his jump off as a momentary impulse that is out of
character for him.
He resolves to submit to the embarrassment of a court
enquiry into the affair because he is sure he is eventually bound to clear
his name, "to come upon sorne sort of chance to get it aIl back again"
(p. 179).
AIso, rather than admit he is not a hero he blames his shipmates
for someho\>, infecting him wi th their cowardly panic.
he has felt superior to them:
From the beginning
"he rubbed shoulders with them, but they
90Jim is like Almayer in preferring his own world of private
visions to the material one around him. (See pp. 23-25).
91 Pau1 w~'1 ey d escr~'b es J~m
" s pass~v~
' 'ty as b e~ng
'
cause d b y h'~s
habit "of living through an experience by thought in advance of actuality"
(Conrad's Measure of Man, p. 53). Eloise K. Hay sees two aspects of his
imagination: "it carries him away from "reality" with images of his own
possible heroic actions. On the other hand, when emergency strikes, his
imagination magnifies the horror beyond aIl grasp." ("Lord Jim: From Sketch
to Novel," College English, 12 (1960), 289-309).
58
could not touch
(pp. 24-5).
him~
he shared the air they breathed, but he was different"
During the crisis, as the others try desperately to free the
lifeboat, he says, "I loathed them.
that
l hated them.
l had to look at aIl
Was ever there anyone so sharnefully tried!" (p. 105).
He implies
that their actions wreck his composure and cause him to jurnp:
Oh, yes, l know very weIl - l jurnped. Certainly, l jurnped!
l told you l jurnped~ but l tell you they were too much for
any man. It was their doing as plainly as if they had
reached up with a boathook and pulled me over (p. 123).
This attitude contradicts his romantic individualism.
It shows that when
his external situation is undisturbed he retreats into his solitary fantasy
world using "his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of selfknowledge" (p. 80).
But when he becomes involved in something dishonourable
and his self-esteem is threatened, he insists that his connection to the
tainting event is the accidentaI result of causes beyond his control and
does not reflect on his merit.
Jim is sincere in this belief.
cynically blarning the others to conceal his cowardice.
He is not
His romanticized
view of himself is so intense that he cannot conceive of himself as a coward,
and if he seems to be one it must be because external circurnstances swept
him away.
This defense mechanism allows Jim to sustain his fine opinion of
himself by shifting the responsibility for his actions elsewhere.
The aspect of Jim that fascinates Marlow is connected to this.
He perceives that Jim is trapped in "the impossible world of romantic achievements" (p. 83).
But at the same time, because of Jim's appearance and
ambitions, he cannot quite fathom why he should be so unreliable in an
emergency:
"He was the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his
59
looks, leave in charge of the deck - figuratively and professionally
speaking" (p. 44).
For Marlow there are "depths of horror" (p. 45) in
the realization that someone as capable looking as Jim can be a coward.
Through this contradiction Conrad establishes the framework that enables
him to dramatize his social philosophy.
Jim's "é'goisme" compels him to
transgress certain rules that Marlow considers necessary for the orderly
functioning of society.
This pattern parallels the central one in "Heart
of Darkness" where Marlow measures Kurtz's "égoisme" against the work
ethic as manifested through the white man's burden.
He considers Jim's
actions in a similar way, but his standards of judgement are more precise
than with Kurtz although they do eventually link up with the white man's
burden.
Marlow constantly reiterates to his audience that Jim is "one
of us."
92
On the simplest level this means Jim is a sailor:
Marlow' s
'
.
ak e th em respon d to
·
1 1steners
are a Il sea f
ar1ng
men 93 an d h
e '1S try1ng
to m
Jim in their own terms.
They are acutely aware that Jim's action has be-
smirched "the honour of the craft" (p.46), and Marlow speaks for them aIl
when he expresses his dismay that Jim has violated the social rules of the
"obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by
fidelity to a certain standard of conduct" (p. 50).
show~
The Brierly episode
in concrete terms just how important this fidelity is.
For Brierly
92
The phrase is re~eated ten times in the book: pp. ix, 43, 78,
93, 106, 224, 325, 331, 361, 416.
93rn an aside to them Marlow comments, "There is such magnificent
vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea" (p. 129).
60
thinks Jim's action "is abominable.
Why, Marlow, don't you think, don't
you feel, that this is abominable; don't you now - come - as a seaman?"
(p. 67).
Brierly commits suicide because he cannot come to terms with
Jim's betrayal of the standards that are the cornerstone of his existence.
94
Contrasting to this is the behaviour of the French lieutenant
who guides the Patna safely to port.
In Marlow's view he is "one of those
steady, reliable men" (p. l43) who uphold the sailor's code despite all
obstacles.
In a long talk with Marlow he reveals his personal philosophy:
Man is born a coward (L'homme est né poltron). It is a
difficulty - parbleu! It would be too easy otherwise.
But habit - habit - necessity - do you see? - the eye
of others - voilà. One puts up with it. And then the
example of others who are no better than yourself, and
yet make good countenance • • . (p. 147).
The Lieutenant's stress on "the eye of others" as a restraining force on
the individual parallels Conrad's own expressed belief that society is
organized to control man's unruly tendencies.
95
This view seems to impress
Marlow, for in reacting against the "sense of finality" (p. 158) of Jim's
trial he remarks, "The thing was always with me, l was always eager to take
opinion on it, as though it had not been practically settled:
opinion - international opinion - by Jove!
individual
That Frenchman's, for instance"
94This act of escapism shows that Brierly, despite his nautical
efficiency, is unsure of his commitment to the seaman's code and is afraid
that he might duplicate Jim's cowardice under similar conditions of stress.
His suicide is also an act of supreme "~goisme" because he has personalized
the code to an alarming degree. Marlow comments, "at bottom poor Brierly
must have been thinking of himself" (p. 66). Brierly' s mate, Jones, has a
similar perception when he tells Marlow, "neither you nor I, sir, had ever
thought so much of ourselves" (p. 65). For similar views of the Brierly
episode see Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, pp. 148-49 and Moser, Joseph Conrad:
Achievement and Decline, pp. 41-42.
95see Conrad' s remark that "L 'homme est un animal méchant." These
words, in the same spirit as the opening ones of the lieutenant's passage,
are contained in a letter written in the same year as Lord Jim. (See p. 10).
61
(p. 159).
Marlow makes no simplistic judgements about Jim's behaviour
because although, like Brierly, he can see him in relation to the seaman's
code, he is also aware of the deeper social implications beneath this,
thanks partially to the lieutenant's observation about how aIl codes are
imposed on a person.
Although Marlow recognizes the unhealthy aspects of
Jim's "égoisme," at the same time he wonders if this is entirely to blame
for his misdeed.
For if a man is only kept honest by "the eye of others"
then perhaps, as Jim maintains, he should not be judged too harshly for
his desertion.
During the Patna crisis he was not only paralysed by his
imagination but also surrounded by cowards.
Marlow wonders whether Jim
would have been jolted out of his inaction in a constructive way if he had
been in the company of disciplined men, faithful to the sailors' code.
This possibility accounts for Marlow's tolerance towards Jim.
96
For if
adherence to a code depends entirely on chance association with its strong
supporters then its value is only relative, and to judge Jim in the absolute
terms of a Brierly or the court may be technically correct but is morally
unjust.
Marlow recognizes that "The real significance of crime is in its
being a breach of faith with the community of mankind" (p. 157).
But he
also knows.that "While there's life there is hope, truly; but there is fear,
too" (p. 177).
His keen perception of both the social and personal sides of
Jim's situation makes him the ideal person to help Jim practically and also
96Marlow is unaware of the youthful Jim's reluctance to act in
another lifeboat incident aboard his training ship.
62
to try to cure him of his romantic excesses.
97
that Jim's central problem is his isolation:
After the trial he sees
"There was nothing but
myself between him and the dark ocean" (p. 174).
In such a situation
Jim's "égoisme" can only get worse, for,banished from the concerned "eye
of others," he will retreat further into his fantasy world or become
totally victimized by other social outcasts such as Chester and Robinson.
Marlow deals with this problem in two ways.
At first he tries to keep
Jim in contact with his society by obtaining a job for him through a friend.
Jim will always be looked upon with suspicion, but Marlow feels he must
have sorne social role.
The friend is a "more than middle-aged bachelor"
(p. 187) and Marlow hopes that Jim will respond to him as a father figure
and perhaps feel there is sorne stability in his life.
But Jim leaves the
job after a few months because the Patna's second engineer appears and
reminds him of the pasto
ship's chandler.
Marlow tries again and gets him a job with a
This is an even shrewder choice on Marlow's part because
it allows Jim to associate with sailors again, admittedly in a subservient
role, but possibly providing hirn with fue chance to perform reliably and
live down his pasto
But Jim abandons this and subsequent jobs when other
chance references to the Patna affair drop up.
Marlow sees that Jim's
behaviour is not the result of guilt feelings - he has already shuffled
the responsibility for his cowardice off on to others - but is another
aspect of his
97
"~goisme"
that renders hirn incapable of reintegrating into
Tanner states that Marlow's experiences in "Youth" (1898)
moved him from romanticism to pragmatisrn and he is sympathetic to Jim
because he thinks Jirn's attitudes will make a similar shift under the
right circumstances (Conrad: Lord Jim, pp. 13-14).
63
normal society.
He does not appreciate practical assistance because he
is still only really interested in fulfilling his self-image by sorne
heroic act.
Marlow comments, "I seemed to perceive dimly that what he
wanted, what he was, as it were, waiting for, was something not easy to
define - something in the nature of an opportunity" (pp. 201-202).
With
Stein's help he gives Jim this opportunity by sending him to Patusan.
Marlow feels this is the best that can be done for Jim.
It gets him
away from the disapproving stares of white society which he will never
be able to come to terms with, and at the same time it provides him with
the basis for a socially useful existence.
For perhaps in Patusan the
parsonage values - duty, obedience, humility - which were instilled in
Jim as a child will reassert themselves and these will discipline his
"égoisme".
And, of course, the most obvious way for such values to be
expressed is through observance of the white man's burden.
Thus Jim's removal to Patusan links the general implications of
his dilemma directly to the burden.
Marlow's refrain about Jim's being
"one of us" obviously contains traces of thisi for besides being sailors
the group he addresses also represents a small minority of white men in
. d area. 98
a co 1 onlze
Brierly is very conscious of this fact and is
disgusted with Jim because his action makes aIl whites look untrustworthy
in native eyes and increases the difficulties in upholding the burè.en.
Brierly wants Jim to run away so that news of the affair will not spread
98The racial overtones of "one of us" appear near the end of the
book when Marlow compares Dain Waris and Jim: "He had not Jim's racial
prestige and the reputation of invincible, supernatural power. He was
not the visible, tangible incarnation of unfailing truth and of unfailing
victory. Beloved, trusted, and admired as he was, he was still one of
them, while Jim was one of us (p. 361. Conrad's emphasis).
and the white community as a whole will not be implicated:
This infernal publicity is too shocking:
"He mustl
there he sits while aIl these
confounded natives, serangs, lascars, quartermasters are giving evidence
that's enough to burn a man to ashes with shame" (p. 67).
Brierly is
aware that in violating the seaman's code the crew has also betrayed the
white man's burden, since the passengers were aIl non-Caucasians.
99
This
increases the irony of the fact, one which infuriates Brierly, that the
two Malays remained at the helm, thus upholding the seaman's code and that
of the burden as weIl.
Thus, the burden theme is present from the begin-
ning, and when Jim is introduced to stein he cornes under the influence of
one of its most successful exponents.
trader.
Like Lingard stein is a wealthy
He has been a "merchant, adventurer, sometime adviser of a
Malay sultan" (p. 203), but when Jim meets him he is semi-retired and
devotes most of his time to his hobby of collecting insects.
In making
Jim the manager of his trading post in Patusan "Stein was passing on to
a young man the help he had received in his own young days" (pp. 230-31)
from an old Scottish trader.
Hopefully, Jim will continue the tradition
of advising the Malays and, of course, making a profit.
Stein thinks
that involvement in practical activity of this sort will cure Jim's
romanticism.
himself.
He is sympathetic to Jim's problem because he is a romantic
But he has learned to control this tendency so that he is also
capable of contending successfully with material reality:
he catches his
99In the notice to the British House of Commons concerriing the
actual case of desertion upon which Conrad based the Patna affair a similar
concern can be noticed. It mentions, "Several successive cases in past
years in which large numbers of native Passengers were drowned while the
Officers and Crew escaped and in which a strong suspicion arose that native
passengers were not always treated as white passengers would be." See
Thomas Moser (ed.), Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim: Text, Backgrounds, Sources,
Criticism (New York, 1965), p. 315.
rare butterfly only after he has dealt with the practical problem of
beating off his enemies.
advice to Marlow:
(p. 214).
This is the message contained in the famous
"The way is to the destructive element submit yourself"
The "destructive element" is reality, and the romantic will
not "immerse" (p. 214) himse1f in it but tries to set himself apart from
it by retreating into his romantic dream world.
But Stein also says that
it is necessary "To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream"
(pp. 214-15); and, of Jim, "He is a romantic-romantic • • • And that is
very bad - very bad .
Very good, too" (p. 216).
His seemingly con-
tradictory statements are best explained in terms of "tgoisme".
sees the dangers in excessive romanticism.
Stein
But he is also aware that
total social conformity will deaden the individual.
lOO
A man must have
dreams and ideals, but the important thing about these is that they
must be realizable in the concrete world.
stein seeks his butterflies,
which are beautiful and evasive creatures but still part of material
existence - resting on "a little heap of dirt" (p. 213) - and therefore
obtainable.
Like Marlow he knows that Jim must not be left in social
isolation but must be allowed the chance to channel his "égoisme" in a
constructive way, and therefore he sends him to Patusan.
Because Stein
has successfully balanced his romanticism with practical activity he sees
Jim's journey to Patusan as a means of proving his competence preparatory
to his successful re-entry into white society.
He differs from Marlow in
lOOstein's perceptions are a stage higher than those of the French
lieutenant who sees the social pressures on the individual but is totally
unaware of any sort of "~goisme".
66
this respect.
Marlow is more pessimistic about Jim's eventual compatib-
ility with his society because he has already seen him fail to accomplish
this several times.
He looks upon Jim's trip as a permanent banishment
but hopes he can find opportunities in Patusan to fulfil himself.
Both
men see possibilities of Jim serving the white man's burden, but for
entirely different reasons.
Before he leaves Marlow impresses upon Jim the fact that "once
he got in, it would be for the outside world as though he had never
existed" (p. 232).
Jim is delighted, and this attitude frightens Marlow:
He was voluble like a youngster on the eve of a long holiday
with a prospect of delightful scrapes, and such an attitude
of mind in a grown man and in this connection had in it
something phenomenal, a little mad, dar.gerous, unsafe (p. 234).
Marlow gives him a revolver and this gift has connections to the burden
theme.
Taken as a symbol of imperialism it suggests that Marlow views
Patusan as an area that Jim might have to enter by force.
Thus Marlow
sees the burden in the traditional way, as something to be imposed on
primitive peoples, and the gun is a warning to Jim to overcome his previous
passivity.
But Jim forgets the bullets and this foreshadows his success
in being accepted in Patusan as something other than the ordinary colonizer.
AIso, perhaps, an empty revolver being a symbol of impotence, it hints at
Jim's eventual powerlessness to help himself or Patusan.
Marlow does not see him again for two years.
He leaves, and
When he then visits Patusan
Marlow is impressed at how successfully Jim has settled into his new
situation and, particularly, at how competently he seems to be upholding
the white man's burden.
For when Jim first arrived in Patusan the political
situation was in a shambles.
Two rival Malay groups were jockeying for
control of the main area while an Arab and his band terrorized the
surrounding countryside.
Jim organized the Malay faction that was friendly
to him and through his planning and encouragement they banished the Arab
from the area.
This bold action cowed the other group of Malays and
peace is finally restored in the country.
Thus Jim, by exercising this
"power to make peace" (p. 261), fulfils one of the main demands of the
burden, that of creating social order by bringing political stability to
an area.
By this action "he became the virtual ruler of the land"
(p. 273) .101
He marries a local girl and involves himself wholeheartedly
in every aspect of the community, always with the intention of improving
't
].
.102
On the surface his devotion is entirely selfless.
Unlike Lingard
and stein he does not help the Malays primarily to have a stable trading
area.
And he assimilates more completely into native society than, for
instance, Willems does, because he has no obvious racist tendencies, and
with his excessive pride he is convinced of his own potential for contributing to it.
Jim does not use the burden's principles for his own
profit or because of missionary zeal.
He is genuinely interested in
helping Patusan, and he devotes his energy and knowledge to satisfying
the needs of the inhabitants.
No detail of daily life is too small for
him to attend to personally:
sorne villagers are robbed of "a few pieces
of gurn or beeswax" (p. 249) and Jim settles the affair; he spends two
days settling a domestic squabble over three brass pots (p. 268); and
101Jim, like Lingard, has obvious parallels to the career of
Rajah James Brooke.
102comparisons with Kurtz are unavoidable, and Fleishman surns
up their differences best: "Jim learns to employ his power in reordering
the structure of the community, rather than, like Kurtz, accepting and
exploiting the community's worst potentialities." (Conrad's Politics,
p. 107).
68
when he is seeing Marlow off he has to deal with the complaint of a
fishing village about someone extorting their supply of turtles' eggs
(p. 333).
But while Marlow admires Jim's devotion to the Malays, he
is disturbed by certain aspects of the relationship.
He recognizes that
there is something unhealthy in Jim's insistence on so completely dominating every area of the community's life:
He looked with an owner's eye at the peace of the evening,
at the river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of
the forests, at the life of the old mankind, at the secrets
of the land, at the pride of his own heart.: but it was they
that possessed him and made him their own (pp. 247-48).
Marlow's awareness here that in serving Patusan Jim has somehow become
its prisoner is carried over into his description of Jewel's attitude
to her lover:
He was jealously loved, but why she should be jealous,
and of what, l could not tell. The land, the people,
the forests were her accomplices, guarding him with
vigilant accord, with an air of seclusion, of mystery,
of invincible possession. There was no appeal, as it
werei he was imprisoned within the very freedom of
his power (p. 283).103
Marlow says, "I can't with mere words convey to you the impression of his
total and utter isolation" (p. 272), thus admitting his failure in sending
Jim to Patusan to become an integral part of a community.
For although
Jim is serving Patusan through his dedication to the white man's burden,
he only does this according to his own terms in that it makes him feel
heroic.
"He seemed to love the land and the people with a sort of fierce
egoism, with a contemptuou5 tenderness" (p. 248), because by his success
l03Like Aissa, Jewel's possessiveness is her main characteristic.
But Aissa is malicious compared to Jewel: she manipulates Willems until
he betrays Lingard, thus making him her prisoner. Jim, because he cannot
accept it himself, has not told Jewel the truth about why he came to
Patusan. Jewel knows he i5 hiding something but, ironically, she thinks
it will draw him back into the white world and she will lose him.
69
there he can reassure himself of his own merit and reaffirm that his own
society misjudged him.
But his "égoisme" cannot be entirely fulfilled by
this type of social service.
Still under the influence of his childhood
adventure stories, he needs the excitement of personal heroics for complete
satisfaction:
104
he leads the charge on Sherif Ali's stockade and considers
his achievement "immense" (p. 271) ; and when he confronts four attackers,
killing one and capturing the others, he thinks this deed "nad atoned for
everything" (p. 302).
His ego fees off such histrionic physical activity
and becomes even more inflated.
But Conrad subtly shows that his self-
pride is not really justified.
For in leading the charge on the stockade
Jim falls on his face and "if it hadn't been for Dain Waris, a pock-marked
tattooed vagabond would have pinned him with his spear to a baulk of timber
like one of Stein's beetles" (p. 270) .105
And he wou Id not have defeated
104Jim ,s childish behaviour is stress;d throughout the story. He
is young anyway - only 24 - and besides being too influenced by his boyhood
books he blushes easily and has an adolescent aggressiveness that shows
itself in his wanting to pick a fight with Marlow and in his actual brawl
with the cross-eyed Dane. After the trial Marlow finds him "as manage able
as a little child" (p. 170), and Cornelius several times describes him as
"no more than a little child" (p. 327). Wallace Fowlie's observations,
in another context, are illuminating when applied to Jim: "The modern
hero in literature seems to be characterized by his search and effort to
adjust the world to the facts of his imagination. Thus, the modern hero
represents, to an extraordinary degree, a case of infantilism. He is a
child, not because of his innocency, but by his reconstruction of a distorted world." Critics (notably Hay), in commenting on Jim's indecisiveness, have seen him as a type of nautical Hamlet. But Fowlie discredits
this view by showing that classical heroesattempt to see reality clearly,
not distort it like Jim. See "Swann and Hamlet: A Note on the Contemporary
Hero," Partisan Review, 9 (May-JUne, 1942), 195-202.
105
Tony Tanner groups some of the book's characters according to
butterfly-beetle imagery. Chester, Cornelius and Brown are aIl beetles,
used to the dirt of the world. Jim tries to avoid this by seeing himself
as a butterfly, and his inability to contend with the beetle elements is
what destroys him. See "Butterflies and Beetles - Conrad's Two Truths,"
Chicago Review, XVI (Winter-Spring, 1963), 123-140.
70
his would-be assassins if Jewel had not been outside the window holding
the torc:l for him to see them by:
"AlI that time the torch had remained
vertical in the grip of a little hand, without so much as a tremble"
(p. 303) .106
In Patusan Jim is "like a figure set up on a pedestal"
(p. 265) but, unlike Kurtz whose position with the natives was the same,
Jim is self-deceived about his merits and his power.
Marlow realizes it,
and as he thinks of Jim's revered status he comments,
l don' t know whether i t \'las exactly fair to him to remember
the incident which had given a new direction to his life,
but at that very moment l remembered very distinctly. It
was like a shadow in the light (p. 265).
Despi te his success Jim' s "égoisme" will not allow him to be
content with his Patusan triumphs.
He says of the Malays, "rf you ask
them who is brave - who is true - who is just - who is it that they would
trust with their lives? - they would say, Tuan Jim.
never know the real, real truth • • ." (p. 305).
And yet they can
Unfortunately for him
he sees his new status in relation to his past failure, and this cancels
out his happiness.
And because he has never really admitted to himself
his cowardice aboard the Patna, but thinks he was merely the victim of
a momentary aberration, he is frustrated that the white world should
continue to judge him by the incident.
He is not satisfied with the
adulation of the Malays but still wants the admiration of the outside
world.
He says, of the Malays,
106By compar~ng
'h
t '~s to his situation with the Patna's crew
additional support is gained for the interpretation that Jim is courageous
when the people around him are.
71
'I must stick ~.) their belief in me to feel safe and to to' • • • He cast about for a word, seemed to look for it
on the sea • • . ' to keep in touch with' • • . His voice
sank suddenly to a murmur.
.' with those whom, perhaps,
l shall never see any more' (p. 334).
He considers his presence necessary in Patusan to keep order:
to think what it would be if l went away.
loose" (p. 333).
"Only try
Jovel can't you see it?
Hell
But, appearances to the contrary, his willingness to
carry the white man's burden does not stem from his concern for the Malays.
Jim simply wants the white world to admit that he really is heroic, and so
ultimately his devotion to Patusan is an extension of his "égoisme".
is the ironical peak of the book:
This
that Jim, whose concern for himself
caused him to break the sailor's code and that of the burden, should try
to clear his reputation by faithful service to the burden when no one in
the outside world is aware of what he is doing.
Jim is doing the right
thing for the wrong reason since he helps Patusan only to be admired by
whites.
Thus Conrad shows that Jim's attitude is a racist one at bottom.
He is paternalistic and, perhaps as a result of his parsonage days, he
exhibits the patronizing superiority of the white missionary by his
insistence on controlling aIl areas of Patusan's existence.
loves Jewel but always keeps his inmost thoughts from her.
is his best friend but Jim causes his death.
persona1 1eve 1 s
. , s exp lo~tat~on
'
.
J~m
0
He supposedly
Dain Waris
On both the political and
f th
"~s
e Malays
. d ence. 107
~n ev~
107conrad himself was sympathetic to Malays, although he had
trouble portraying them and aIl his native characters with any psychological accuracy. This accounts for his preference for dealing with halfbreeds, since he could assign to them familiar attitudes without violating
their social characteristics. Although a full-blooded Malay, Dain Waris
is depicted in this way since he is described as having "a European
mind" (p. 262).
e
72
Although Jim thinks he is doing constructive work in Patusan those on
the outside are convinced he is doing the opposite, as we see in the
book's last section when the unknown recipient of Marlow's letter thinks
that Jim has "gone native" and is ignoring the burden.
his objections to Jim's Patusan activities:
Marlow answers
"You contended that 'that
kind of thing' was only endurable and enduring when based on a firm
conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are
established the order and morality of an ethical progressIf (p. 339).
Marlow realizes how misunderstood Jim is.
This makes him object to any
simplistic condemnation of him for he sees that, like Kurtz, Jim is a
special case of extreme "égoisme" who should be regarded as a rarity:
"Of aIl mankind Jim had no dealings but with himself, and the question
is whether at the last he had not confessed to a faith mightier than the
laws of order and progress" (p. 339).
Marlow's tolerance is commendable,
but in the final section of the book Conrad shows that Jim's determination
to transcend his concrete situation is useless when confronted by the
cruel demands of reality.
When Gentleman Brown and his piratical cohorts arrive in Patusan
Jim's peaceful situation is disrupted by other outcasts from white society.
Brown and Jim are complete opposites, one being a rakehell criminal and
the other a romantic dreamer.
But, like Jim, Brown is completely guided
by his "égoisme", the only difference being that Brown works entirely on
the material level while Jim is an idealist.
Brown is a total anarchist
whose "égoisme" expresses itself by his refusaI to recognize any social
rules.
He "hated Jim at first sight" (p. 380) because Jim JIhad aIl the
advantages on his side - possession, security, power; he was on the side
of an overwhelming force!
He was not hungry and desperate, and he did
not seem in the least afraid" (p. 380).
Jim has all the strategie
advantages in Patusan and also has an attitude of standoffish superiority
- similar to his bearing aboard the Patna - that annoys Brown.
scoffs at Jim's "butterfly" airs:
Brown
"r've lived - and so did you though
you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so
as to go about without touching the dirty earth" (p. 383).
Brown disturbs
Jim by his courageous swagger, especially in regard to the safety of his
men:
"There are my men in the same boat - and, by God, r am not the
sort to jurnp out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch" (pp. 382-83).
Memories of the Patna flood in on Jim, making him appear indecisive.
Brown notices this, and with his "satanic gift of finding out the best
and weakest spot in his victims" (p. 385) he insinuates to Jim "their
common blood, an assurnption of cornrnon experience; a sickening suggestion
of cornrnon guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds
and of their hearts" (p. 387).
Such association frightens Jim, and he
wants only to be rid of Brown.
He offers him safe passage out of Patusan
and this refusal to deal aggressively with Brown, despite his material
superiority, is the final defensive act of his "égoisme".
For his easy
evasion of the pirate is simply an externalization of his avoidance of
the
~rown-like
qualities in himself.
As the adored hero of Patusan" Jim
is insulated from true self-knowledge because he can pass of the Patna
affair as a freak episode.
But when Brown and his band arrive Jim sees
them as a threat to this self-sustaining view.
They are "emissaries with
whom the world he had renounced was pursuing him in his retreat" (p. 385).
He totally distorts Brown's predicarnent.
He sees him as an invader sent
74
from the world outside to bring Jim bad memories of the pasto
He will
not accept the fa ct that Brown is only an outcast like himself, albeit
an antagonistic one.
When Brown offers this possibility Jim is revolted
and wants only to close his eyes to the suggestion.
His concern for
·himself causes him to mismanage the political situation and this brings
tragedy to Patusan.
Thus Conrad shows that Jim's good works in Patusan are betrayed
in an uncontrollable outburst of his ego.
By his panic at a crucial
moment he repeats his Patna behaviour and others suffer from his reaction.
After Brown's ambush he faces death bravely, but this is only Conrad's
final irony:
Jim has never succeeded in facing reality, so it is fitting
that he dutifully submits to death which releases him from the obligation
forever.
Marlow thinks that Jim's end displays a "profound and terrifying
logic" (p. 342) because it is in answer to "the calI of his exalted
egoism" (p. 416).
He retains his tolerant attitude towards Jim but,
unlike with Kurtz, he is not drastically changed from the encounter.
Kurtz arrives at a clear perception of what he is in relation to the
things around him, and Marlow shares this with him.
But Jim's vision is
blocked by his self-concern, and this places him forever "under a cloud"
(p. 416)108 for Marlow who learns nothing about himself from the younger
man's experiences.
styles of "égoisme".
with Kurtz and Jim Conrad analyses two different
Kurtz's is hard, aggressive, and materialistic;
Jim's is self-indulgent and sentimental and too immersed in private
108Guerard mentions how images of nebulosity - fog, mist, cloud,
dream - pervade the book to convey the impression of Jim's tenuous
relationship to reality. (Conrad the Novelist, p. 162).
75
fantasies to contend with wordly difficulties.
Marlow, more materialist
than romantic, sees reflections of himself in Kurtz but has no similar
response to Jim, so totally involved in pursuing his own "shadowy ideal
of conduct" (p. 416).
Stein is the balance between the two:
one who
attempts to function practicaliy and yet tries to transcend mundane
routine also.
Stein's presence in the book'shows that for Conrad it
is not "égoisme" per se that is a danger but rather the ego expressing
itself unrealistically.
By showing the results of Jim's romanticism
and Kurtz's self-consuming greed for new experiences Conrad demonstrates
that individual ideals and aspirations can only be satisfied in accordance
with the limitations imposed by material reality, and to ignore this
fact is begging for disaster.
76
CONCLUSION
In a letter to Sir Sidney Colvin on March 18, 1917 Conrad
outlined his general intentions as a writer:
l have been called a writer of the sea, of the tropics,
a descriptive writer, a romantic writer - and also a
realist. But as a matter of fact all my concern has
been with the "ideal" value of things, events, people.
That and nothing else. The humorous, the pathetic, the
passionate, the sentimental aspects came in of themselves - mais en vérité c'est les valeurs idéales des
faits et gestes humains, qui se sont imposés 'à mon
activité artistique. 109
This observation, made as Conrad was looking back on a long writing career,
fits his artistic application of the white man's burden into a wider
perspective.
It makes us realize
~~at
his treatment of the burden was
an attempt to establish standards by which his readers can assess its
e
"ideal" value and also the values of the individuals involved with it.
Conrad examines the burden's value as a political ideal by linking it
to imperialism.
He reveals that too often it serves only as a theoretical
justification for imperialism's economic tyranny.
By showing the contra-
diction between this theory and the actions it masks Conrad exposes the
burden as a worthless political ideal because it fails to benefit colonial
peoples and gives no genuine guidance to the whites isolated among them.
All of the characters studied are involved with imperialism to sorne degree.
110
109 Life and Letters, II, 185.
110
In Nostromo (1904) Conrad also investigates imperialism, but
the white man's burden is only in evidence as part of a larger overall
pattern in which Conrad mounts one of literature's most devastating attacks
against idealism. Although silver dominates the lives of all thecharacters
in the book it is only in relation to Charles Gould that it will be mentioned here because he is the only one whose role in relation to the burden
parallels that of the characters analysed in the earlier works.
77
They aIl pursue commercial projects that link them to its goals:
Lingard
and Stein are traders, Almayer thirsts for gold, Kurtz stockpiles ivory,
Gould works his mine.
But in every case except Almayer's Conrad shows
that immediate gratification by material accumulation is not enough to
satisfy the men.
to the burden.
This places them in a contradictory position in respect
They mouth its principles in one way or another but since
they aIl are interested in something other than the process it is intended
to disguise they are operating from a false position.
Thus Lingard is
concerned about the orderly running of his territory.
On the surface
this makes him seem dedicated to the burden.
But his real reason for
being involved with it is to achieve the domination over peoples' lives
that brings him a sense of power.
His blustering Jack Tar manner is an
attempt to bolster this impression of himself as a dynamic, virile figure.
Kurtz is the best ivory-gatherer his company has and everyone sees him
as devoted to the burden.
But this alone does not satisfy him.
He tries
to expand his talents to gOd-like proportions by refusing to limit his
appetites.
Marlow has an image of his greed when he sees him on the
stretcher "opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour aIl the earth
with aIl its mankind" (p. 137).
Jim seems to be the perfect represent-
ative of the burden, but the Malays are not really his prime concern but
are just the extras he needs around him to support the heroic gestures
of his self-dramatization.
stein controls an elaborate trading business
but is more interested in his butterflies.
Gould seems a model of cool
efficiency in using the burden to justify his development of the mine
78
in Costaguana:
What is wanted here is law, good faith, order, security.
Any one can declaim about these things, but l pin my faith
to material interests. Only let material interests once
get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the
conditions on which they can continue to existe That's
how your money-making is justified here in the face of
lawlessness and.disorder. It is justified because the
security which it demands must bé shared with an oppressed
people. A better justice will come afterwards. lll
Despite such statements Gould is just as much in pursuit of "a shadowy
ideal of conduct" as Jim with his insistence on
.
us~ng
.;
San Tome as a
moral purifier of his father's memory.
Such situations account for much of the complexity bf the works
studied.
For Conrad is not only examining the "ideal" value of the
burden but is also evaluating the personal ideals of the people involved
with it.
They are aIl seeking fulfilment beyond thecircumscription of
the burden's principles and this is the main source of conflict in their
lives.
This is why Conrad's view of the relationship between the indiv-
idual and society is so important.
The burden is obviously a public
ideal that European society has established to assist its economic
functioning.
But for Conrad "La société est essentiellement criminelle"
because its rules repress the individual.
people who submit to this
repression are not the type to venture into primitive areas where their
passive observance of society's regulations may not sustain them:
because
of totally different conditions their rules may be inapplicable in such
places.
This type, which Marlow accuses his listeners of being, pre fers
to remain "with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind
lllJoseph Conrad, Nostromo (New York, 1925), p. 84.
79
neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately
between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandaI
and gallows and lunatic asylums" ("Heart of Darkness", p. 109).
If
such people are concerned with the burden they are like Marlow's aunt
or Jim's family safe in their parsonage, mere mouthers of its abstract
principles with no awareness of what these entail in practice.
Or, if
they are removed from their normal social framework, like Kayerts and
Carlier, they disintegrate rapidly because they have no inner resources
to sus tain them.
Seen in this light Conrad's works show that the only
type of person capable of taking up the burden is someone with a strong
amount of "égoisme"', someone willing to dare the unknown.
But "égoisme"
is the enemy of social ideals and this is why the people best suited to
uphold the burden so often violate its aims.
In their own society their
"égoisme" was repressed by social mechanisms like everyone else's.
But
in the colonies, where society expects them to shoulder its burden, since
there are no force fuI restrictions their des ire for personal fulfilment
bUrsts forth.
These expressions of individuality take different forros,
and ",onrad examines them to provide us with the means to judge the "ideal"
value of his characters' various personal desires.
AlI his heroes are in sorne way incomplete.
It seems that leading
a productive life as stable members of society, because of the necessary
hindrances collective existence brings, does not provide them with the
freedom to complete themselves.
By transporting them from this situation
and placing them in a colonial context Conrad shows us what happens when
they have this.
The settings of the books help put into perspective their
80
different struggles for self-expression.
Kurtz, leading a life of
unrestrained individualism on the material level, inhabits the deepest
part of the jungle.
Concretely this suggests how far removed his behaviour
is from the norms of his society.
Symbolically it represents his surrender
to the unconscious urges that drive him to fulfil himself.
setting has none of the threatening aspect of Kurtz's.
Jim's Patusan
It has a developed
social structure and Jim uses this as a private reserve to achieve his
dream of being an admired hero.
Charles Gould inhabits a highly complex
civilization, but one which is filled with corruption and disorder.
Because of his ownership of the incorruptible silver Gould thinks he can
change this situation.
In symbolic terms hismoral idealism is an ex-
pression of the desire to purify a fallen world and re-create Eden.
112
But although his characters seek the fulfilment of their personal
ideals Conrad rarely shows them achieving it.
burden to pursue their own
end~
In taking advantage of the
or by trying to move beyond its restrictions
they too often lose all sensé of proportion.
The burden is above all a
guide to social behaviour, a means of limiting individu al aspirations by
subordinating them to a sense of dutY and service.
Although his art
questions the burden's "ideal" value Conrad's basic conservatism makes
him believe in the necessity of limits on individualism:
For the great massof mankind the only saving grace that
is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand
and heart in the short moment of each human effort. In
other and greater words, what is needed is a sense of
immediate duty, and a feeling of impalpable constraint. 113
l12claire Rosenfield, Paradise of Snakes (Chicago and London,
1967), p. 50.
113
Joseph Conrad, "Well Done," Notes on Life and Letters (New
York, 1925), 179-193.
81
This is the expression of a social ideal that Conrad often puts into
Marlow's mouth.
But Conrad also believed that man was a perverse being
(un animal méchant) who could not be relied upon to adhere to any sort
of "fidelity".
He saw that fidelity to social rules helped the world
function efficiently and protected men from anarchy, but that man's
"égoisme" could not always be denied and eruptions of individuality
were bound to occur.
The white man's burden was a medium through which
Conrad could explore this conflict, and by showing how his characters
respond to this he illustrates the complex nature of the relationship
between the
ind~vidual's
and society's needs.
Characters such as Kurtz
and Jim lack aIl sense of discipline and become totally victimized by
their own "égoisme".
Others, like stein and Marlow, fulfil their desires
yet at the same time maintain a "fidelity" to something external to
themselves.
Conrad's writings show that the achievement of such balance
was for him the most valuable human attribute.
82
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