Joseph Conrad, the Malay Archipelago, and the Decadent Hero Author(s): Marialuisa Bignami Source: The Review

of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 38, No. 150 (May, 1987), pp. 199-210 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/515423 Accessed: 12/10/2009 06:49
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THE JOSEPH CONRAD, MALAY AND ARCHIPELAGO, HERO DECADENT

By MARIALUISA BIGNAMI

THE

DURING his sea-going life Joseph Conrad spent only a very short time in the geographical area he himself defines as 'the region of the Indian Ocean, with its offshoots and prolongations north of the Equator even as far as the Gulf of Siam';1 yet possibly sixteen2 of his novels and short stories make use of this area for their location or background. It is the purpose of this paper to attempt to show that so peculiar is the region's character that it gradually was to become a metaphor for the set of values with which Conrad endows his characters. The 'offshoots' of this region may reach as far north as the Gulf of Siam or as far west as Mauritius, but for Conrad its core is the Malay Archipelago, the whole area pivoting on Singapore, which Conrad consistently calls 'an Eastern port', as if he were afraid of committing himself by naming such an obvious spot on the map of the British Empire. Conrad never really stated his attitude to the British Empire and all we know about it must be inferred by contrasting it with his attitude to Belgian imperialism in the Congo or to more 'subtle' forms of imperialism as portrayed in some of the so-called 'political' novels.3 One may of course maintain that he never dealt with the British Empire in detail, just as with British politics at large, because he was trying to get himself accepted as a citizen and an author by Britain and therefore needed all the benevolence he could summon from his foster country. But such a view does not give sufficient weight to the subtle insight into the world of moral values which was his constant concern and which had little to do either with political ideas in general or with the specific politics governing one vast community. The purpose of this paper is not to deal with Conrad's attitude to
1 Author's Note to 'Twixt Land and Sea. In Victory (p. 7) the region is defined as 'Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn around a point in North Borneo ... It just touched Manila ... It just touched Saigon.' 2 'Karain', 'The Lagoon', 'The Planter of Malata', 'Because of the Dollars', Almayer's Folly, The Rescue, An Outcast of the Islands, Victory, 'Youth', 'The End of the Tether', The Shadow Line, 'A Smile of Fortune', 'The Secret Sharer', 'Freya of the Seven Isles', 'Falk', LordJim. 3 Mainly Nostromo. See also E. K. Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (Chicago, I963). PressI987 RESNew Series, Vol. XXXVIII,No. 150 (1987) ? OxfordUniversity

JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAY imperialism, but to examine the metaphoric use he makes of a particular geographical location for narrative purposes. The character of this area as Conrad knew it is nevertheless connected with the history of colonial expansion, and this issue will therefore be taken into consideration for its function in Conrad's narratives. Conrad's first contact with the East was his disastrous voyage on the Palestine, but I feel that his decision, mirrored in Jim's, to take up a berth in the local service after being dismissed from hospital in Singapore is the really significant episode: after having had, so to speak, a taste of the East-albeit a bitter one-in 1882, Conrad seems to have decided in 1887 to explore it at length, serving as second mate on the Vidar. In the intervening years he had had glimpses of the world that lay beyond and around Singapore, had certainly heard much about it in sailors' yarns and-one may suppose-must have felt attracted by territories in which every man seemed to count for himself.4 Although not an area to which Europeans were foreign, the Malay Archipelago lay outside formal colonial rule during the years of Conrad's travelling through and around it,5 yet each successive effort at colonization had left behind some of its own men and customs: Portuguese, Arab, and Dutch had intermingled with local populations, themselves migrating and in turn overpowering each other. On the eve of Conrad's first encounter with the area, the Dutch and the English had worked out an agreement about its commercial exploitation and its general 'policing', and the labours of this agreement can clearly be seen in the events depicted in Almayer's Folly.6 200 BIGNAMI:
Conrad's mood about these territories is probably best revealed in his later works, e.g. in Heyst's exclamation 'I am enchanted with these islands' (Victory, p. 7). See my treatment of Victory, below, for this point. 5 I am not referring particularly to the Vidar period here, but to Conrad's seagoing years in general. 6 Although the Arabs had slowly been moving to this region and between the seventh and fifteenth centuries establishing their own sultanates, which survived into Conrad's days, the Portuguese were the first European colonists in it and they ruled unrivalled over it for the whole of the sixteenth century. The seventeenth century saw the Dutch move into the region and their position there was challenged in turn by the British during the eighteenth century. In the same period the French, having lost the bid for India to Britain, also tried to settle in South-East Asia and ended by getting possession of the Indo-Chinese peninsula, on the margin of Conrad's 'East'. Spain, too, had its own settlement in South-East Asia, but in the Philippines, quite outside Conrad's Eastern locations. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, with the Portuguese in control only of Timor, the actual Malay Archipelago was under British and Dutch influence; which meant that they charged local 'rajahs' with collecting taxes, sold, under monopoly, cheap European manufactured goods, induced the farming of useful 'exotic' crops, and developed mining. For these last two activities they were compelled to import large amounts of labour from India and China: whereas the Indians went back, the Chinese stayed on in the Malay Archipelago and made the racial scene even more varied and complicated. For details on the colonial situation here briefly outlined see: G. C. Allen and A. G. Donnithorne, Western Enterprises in Indonesia and Malaya (London, I957); J. Kennedy, A History of
4

AND THE DECADENT HERO 201 ARCHIPELAGO, This arrangement is much in line with one of the traditional tenets of the colonial attitude of the British, their peculiar attitude to relationships with overseas territories: it was not until the final decades of the nineteenth century that Britain was reconciled to the idea of actually ruling over vast territories such as India and the African colonies. Britain had, however, taken care to establish a network of key ports through which a profitable commerce of buying raw materials and selling manufactured products could be conducted. This sort of procedure did not burden the mother-country with a costly and troublesome administration, nor did it appear properly 'colonial'-in the sense in which the Spanish Empire had been in South Americain that it did not interfere with the local population's traditions in government, language, and religion. This institutional and economic background does not seem to have been of interest to Conrad in the least; what was of interest to him was the human environment resulting from such a situation in which, alongside merchants conducting their business correctly, were to be found all sorts of misfits and outcasts, men who were to become the Lingards and the Steins, the romantic adventurers in the writings of this aristocratic Polish expatriate. Conrad had had a chequered and stimulating education and youth, had of his own choice disciplined himself in his early maturity by serving faithfully and professionally in the British merchant navy, but had never grasped-and never was to grasp-a faith and a cerwhich were foreign not so much to his personal background tainty as to the cultural and artistic context in which he was to work as he turned from sailor to writer. It is as a Decadent artist, then, that Conrad looks back on the sort of men he met while sailing in the East, as well as on the settlements that made their life and activities possible, and realizes that only in such a place could the desperate and faithless men of his imaginative world live and thrive. They are desperate, I would like to emphasize, not because they have lost faith in any political or religious ideal, nor because they are legally outside civilized society-which they often are-but because they have come to believe that no faith or ideal exists. No inherited frame of mind or set of values seem to Conrad worth pursuing, and appropriately the characters of his Eastern stories are often social misfits or downright legal offenders, such as Lingard, a poor boy from an English fishing village but a 'king' in the East, or Jim, who has abandoned his ship; no one will ask them embarrassing
Malaya, I400-I959 (New York, 1962); J. Bastin and H. J. Benda, A History of Modern Southeast Asia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968); C. P. Fitzgerald, A ConciseHistory of East Asia (New York-Washington, I966).

JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAY questions in an Eastern port, but none the less they will never find peace. Their quest is inevitably going to end as Kurtz's does: in what has become the locus classicus in which to look for Conrad's philolearn that at the end of Darkness-we sophical statements-Heart of a whole lifetime of probing into the heart of darkness, of burning oneself up in a see-saw of noble and base motives, all that one finds is 'The horror, the horror!' For the purposes of his characterization, issues are nevertheless too clear-cut in the Congo: Conrad makes use of this location in order to give vent to his disgust and suffering at the sight of cruel and crude colonial exploitation, but it will never serve the purpose of a subtle moral and psychological analysis, it will never turn into the mirror image of defeated Western man. Neither Almayer nor Willems is credited by their author with so fine a consciousness as Kurtz, and only Axel Heyst can be said to perceive the vanity of a doomed quest; but Almayer's covering up Nina's footsteps in the sand and drugging himself to death constitute as desperate a gesture as that of the most refined and artistic Decadent soul in Europe. Thus when Conrad, steeped as he was in the reading of French novelists and poets, put pen to paper, it was to the memory of what was to become Almayer, or Willems, or Lingard, that he turned as the symbols of the condition of man as he had learnt to understand it in the world of life and art which surrounded him. The one could conform to, or rebel against, or world of set values-which world whose objective existence outside man's simply transgress-a mind could be taken for granted and which could therefore be safely known and reproduced in art, in a word the world of the Victorians, was not for him. His artistic memory started by going back to the Malay Archipelago at the beginning of his writing career, in the very early 89gos, and never ceased to do so for decades to come, almost to the end of his life. Conrad's effort at defining the moral world of his characters thus makes use of, and becomes peculiarly involved with, a clear historical and geographical situation; his efforts being sustained, as they are, by his mastery of realistic narrative technique. Nothing is vague or just hinted at in Conrad's fiction, as is witnessed by the amount of nautical terms and manoeuvres, which must have embarrassed even contemporary readers, let alone modern ones, possibly less familiar with the details of sail-navigation. In what we shall call his 'Eastern stories', the same procedure is applied to the world of land, or of inland waters, the sea repeatedly becoming a symbol of escape from ambiguous situations. Well-known examples of this are the background situations to 'Falk' and The Shadow Line, and it is also hinted at in 'The Secret Sharer', but Almayer too, watching a floating tree,

202

BIGNAMI:

AND THE DECADENT HERO 203 ARCHIPELAGO, 'began to wonder how far out to sea it would drift' (p. 4);7 and to him 'the present misery of burning sun, of muddy and malodorous river bank disappeared in a gorgeous vision of a splendid future' (p. 62). The inland world-the rivers, forests, clearings, settlements, and becomes a backdrop to these stories in a wealth of compounds-thus description that has rightly been seen as overwhelming by a number of critics. Yet, if we bear with the initial pages of Almayer's Folly and such obvious outspoken symbolism as the floating tree with its outstretched arm of a branch, we are rewarded with descriptions such as that of Almayer's efforts at keeping up a European white man's identity by means of his poor yet cherished furniture and table-ware, or of Nina's cot as the only piece of furniture in the middle of her room, in An Outcast of the Islands. A colonial situation and an actual risk run by white men outside their native environment of lapsing into some sort of savagery are here depicted: but whereas the English merchant in India, for instance, could refer for support and reassurance to a public structure or to institutions modelled on the ones on which he had been raised, Almayer and Jim can turn nowhere for help from the slowly creeping jungle of strangeness, of decay and death surrounding them. Perhaps more pointedly than anywhere else, the particular function of the Malay setting is made clear in the very title of Conrad's first novel and in the event which accounts for its first obvious meaning, the building of the house in which to welcome hoped-for British officials. The house itself, as well as the efforts spent on planning and building it, are described at length: Almayer began building his new house for the use of the future engineers, agents, or settlers of the new [British Borneo] Company. He spent every available guilder on it with a confident heart .... the grey-headed and foolish dreamer invited his guests to visit his new house ... in the great empty rooms where the tepid wind entering through the sashless windows whirled gently the dried leaves and the dust of many days of neglect, Almayer . . . stamped his foot to show the solidity of the neatly-fitting floors and expatiated upon the beauties and convenience of the building ... the half finished house built for the reception of Englishmen received on that joyous night the name of 'Almayer's Folly' by the unanimous vote of the lighthearted [Dutch] seamen. (pp. 33, 35-7) The proud building is presented to us in its hopeful prime only half-way through the novel when its doomed fate is already well known to the reader from the dismal setting of the initial scene. It was folly on Almayer's part, we perceive from the very beginning, to hope for a saving force to come from outside, because no such thing
7

Page numbers throughout are from the Uniform Edition of J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.

JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAY exists: to the Dutchman born in a botanic garden and doomed to die in a jungle the England which may symbolize order and salvation will forever be a forbidden land. Not only will it never be the backdrop of Nina's social triumphs, but even such dubious substitutes for it as the Dutch fleet or Tom Lingard will not be at hand: the one only briefly and derisively sailing up the Pantai, the other not even getting near the island. Left to fend for himself, Almayer fails, as Willems had done before him. And where could this failure be properly staged if not in Sambir, the settlement over which British and Dutch, Arab and Malay influences are periodically felt, but over which no single nationality seeks to establish its permanent authority. It is a general scene of decay and dereliction from which young people duly flee. As soon as Almayer's Folly was ready for the press, Conrad felt an urgent need to explain at length and justify to his readers the roots of so dismal a plight as Almayer's. It was thus that Willems's betrayal became the subject of his next novel. Time and again Conrad would go back to the issue of loyalty and betrayal, in 'Karain, A Memory' as well as in the first attempt at telling Lingard's story, 'The Rescuer'. The issue crops up again and again in all the 'sea stories' (with varying degrees of success or failure) from The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' to Lord Jim (and the other Marlow narrations) and Typhoon. In all these writings one observes what a safe bulwark for a troubled conscience, what a simple and yet effective set of rules the code of the merchant navy can be. The young captain in 'The Secret Sharer' properly qualifies this when, seduced by the void of tropical nightfall, he forgets his duty and is set upon by chaos. Again we are not confronted with ideals or with a faith, just with the plain, down-to-earth persuasion that a small, confined community, such as a ship, is the only possible kind of society men can set up, a community whose soundness will be tested when it is desperately fighting for survival in a hostile environment. The land-locked characters of the Malay stories lack even this small comfort and solidarity, as well as that of a proper colonial administration: Western social order proves no more than a trap into an incomprehensible death when Jim, in Patusan, tries to cling to it in his dealings with Gentleman Brown. The more Jewel voices her fear that Jim will go away from her, the more the reader becomes aware of the fact that by this Conrad does not simply mean what he has Jim imply, that he will never leave her because he cannot go back to a world whose rules he has broken and which will therefore reject him. Although Jim does not, of course, try to sail back to Europe, he does try to return to those self-same Western rules of conduct when he releases Gentleman Brown, as if theirs were a situation in which 204 BIGNAMI:

AND THE DECADENT HERO 205 ARCHIPELAGO, honour still counts. But what this amounts to in practice is a betrayal of Jewel and her people, and a death for honour's sake which is not, after all, honourable, since no one stands to gain by it: the abiding by a formal code does not bring Jim any closer to the truth that he has sought, and stops him from doing the only good thing he has been able to do in his life, help the people in Patusan and give Jewel a reason for living: 'He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic .. . He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct' (p. 416). Gentleman Brown is here deliberately coupled with Jim to show that 'having been afraid once' does not necessarily mean descending as low as the former had done. The characters whose stories, whether told or just hinted-at, justify their living in the Malay archipelago, are countless. It will be enough to mention Schomberg and Chester, whose reasons for being in the East are not told at length but whose behaviour is enough to persuade the reader that nowhere else in the world would they be allowed to offer cheap entertainment or cheap advice. This could be said of that host of minor characters, whose plight has grown so desperate that they are even represented as going into mixed marriage or conducting illegal trade with local tribes. This is never or Axel Heyst, for instancethe case with the protagonists-Jim but the host of minor degraded characters, hardly distinguishable from the suffocating background scenery, constitutes a significant and ubiquitous reminder of the moral disintegration that constantly threatens Europeans in the East. In this part of the world every man counts for himself, as I said earlier. This is quite clearly the case with Captain Brierly, who finds himself on the brink of an abyss at Jim's trial and has a dismal vision of what the latter's fate will be after his certificate has been cancelled; we may assume that it is this imagined prospect that precipitates his collapse. He behaves at this point as though enacting for us Jim's for that matter the conscience of any individual conscience-or who is 'one of us'-and not simply the conscience of a body of men, the merchant navy, who, in order to preserve their public image unblemished, are willing to punish and cast away the individual who has erred. Each member of such a body will also-at this point-feel that his own private image is safe from disgrace and will rejoice in belonging to a group that has a code and can at some point draw the line of a safe solidarity. But for Brierly Jim's trial and punishment are no security against chaos; he is forced to recognize the possibility that anybody can commit an act of betrayal, even himself. The code

JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAY of the 'us' is so remote from principle and ideal, it can rely only on an ill-defined and even inhuman 'decency' ('a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo of old rags in bales' (p. 68)): the borderline between decent and improper behaviour appears to Brierly to be so hazy that he feels he cannot trust himself to discern it in future. Conscious that should a possible choice present itself he would be alone to face it, he does not feel up to such a threat and jumps from his ship, leaving everything on board it as orderly as a decent man should. A similar lack of faith in any code of justice will later bring Leggatt to his attempted suicide in 'The Secret Sharer'. No 'fellowship of the craft' exists for Captain Whalley either, and, as with Lingard, the Malay archipelago that witnessed his triumph will be the scene of his decay and humiliation, and finally of his honourable death. After his wife's death and his daughter's unfortunate marriage, he seems to be on his way to a decorous old age and well-earned retirement but, as the story slowly reveals, the existence of both sailing-ships and their masters appears to be equally and hopelessly doomed.8 Still, when Whalley sells the Fair Maid and enters into a partnership with Massey over the Sofala, there are yet hopes that he might thrive: Massey himself sees Whalley as a still powerful man, rich and healthy, and is in awe of his nautical competence and his aloofness alike. But the reader already knows from the opening pages of the story that this is not true and that Whalley will be deprived both of his sole support and of his very identity when he loses the Fair Maid. Without it, Whalley literally does not exist (just as Jasper Allen in 'Freya of the Seven Isles' cannot live without his brig), and he can command respect only for the brief period for which his dimmed eyesight will hold out. Nothing coming from outside can save him and, almost unmourned, he goes to the bottom of the sea, the same shallow water on which Jasper Allen's brig is left to rot away. Again, we are not confronted with the depths of the ocean, with its salutary effect on flesh and soul alike as embodied in the exacting home-service: those that work on it are Conrad's successful heroes, they belong to the epic strain of The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', of 'Youth', Typhoon, and The Shadow Line. But here, in the shallow waters of the Malay archipelago, 206
8 It is quite hard to reconstruct a 'tale' in 'The End of the Tether', since Conrad is not interested in telling it. Instead, he gives us Whalley's plight in an artfully constructed model which can be described as a 'present'-the last voyage of the Sofala-with successive flashbacks containing useful excerpts from Whalley's past as well as the past of the officers of the ship. He also gives us a few digressions on the character of Van Wyck. I hope later to be able to show why I talk about 'digressions' in this case. The complex, non-sequential structure of the narrative is naturally meant to tell us that Conrad is not interested in telling Whalley's story so much as in showing us the unfortunate end of sailing ships and men.

BIGNAMI:

AND THE DECADENT HERO 207 ARCHIPELAGO, Conrad's Decadent heroes run aground on the sort of sandbank on which The Rescue ends and which easily becomes a metaphor for Lingard's actual paralysis when action is required. This brings us to the use of autobiography in Conrad's Eastern tales, a most sensitive issue: everything an author writes is, of course, autobiographical in the sense that he always put something of himself into it; moreover the actual episodes in Conrad's life that go to make up a good many of his stories have been carefully traced by his indeed were openly admitted as such by Conrad biographers-and himself.9 Here I am interested in identifying the connections between Conrad's world of ideas and set of values, his intellectual autobiography, and such characters as Jim or Axel Heyst. Not only does Conrad credit Jim with his own motives for going to sea-those that many a school-boy with an inclination for day-dreaming will he does so in a language that betrays a probably always have-but affectionate tone towards the young man. Looking down peculiarly from the height of his Marlow-wisdom, Conrad cannot but feel for the youth whose father is all too glad to get rid of him sympathy ('Jim was one of five sons, and when ... his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a "training ship"', Lord Jim, p. 5) as, we are led to believe, was Tadeusz Bobrowsky to be rid of his restless and impoverished nephew. It is, then, the constant, life-long dreaming aspect of Conrad that goes to make up Jim's character. When Conrad, later in life, writes to his aunt Marguerite Poradowska that he feels he suffers from typical Polish laziness and 'I prefer to dream a novel rather than write it' (5 Jan. I907), we cannot help thinking of Jim and his dreams of great, but unacted deeds of heroism at sea and in distant lands. As with the Judea, it is 'do or die' with Jim, and lack of appropriate action brings him to an untimely death. His travelling farther and farther eastward in order to escape from the penetrating and all-reaching eye of the code he betrayed is far worse than trying to escape the wrath of God-or of any other faith-whose set rules, once believed in, can in comparison supply the believer with an easily followed conduct book. Nothing of the sort is in store for Jim, who is not endowed by his creator with belief in any possible ideal: his lot will be back-waters, jungle, mud, and death at the hand of an uncomprehending and incomprehensible native. Far more complex and subtle is the character Conrad creates in Axel Heyst, possibly the only one of his creations-apart from
9 See, for instance, letter to Mrs Sanderson (1917) about The Shadow Line: 'I must tell you that it is a piece of as strict autobiography as the form allowed' (J. Aubry, Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters (London, 1927), ii. 195). But many of the Prefaces to the Uniform Edition volumes make similar statements.

JOSEPH CONRAD, THE MALAY be graced with a philosophical awareness of Razumov, perhaps-to man's condition on earth. It is no accident that a Schopenhauerean inheritance is mentioned at this point, old Heyst appearing to represent in the novel the world of ideas nineteenth-century Europe had produced and bestowed on its heirs. It is not my intention here to go into the details of this tradition,10 but by recalling it I intend to stress Heyst's isolation in the East: whereas other Eastern characas Jim, Almayer, Whalley, or Lingard-devoid as they ters-such are of faith in an ideal or community, look for solidarity in family and friends in the hope of escaping the slimy void which surrounds them, Heyst knows all too well that even his hope is vain. He retires to live mainly on tinned food left over from his failed mining venture, all alone on his barren island: it does not yield coal, but neither does it contain human society for him. The original Alfuro population has effectively barred the way to its settlements to prevent invasion by European imperialists: the Tropical Belt Coal Company may well exploit the mineral resources of the island for which the natives have no use, but from them there will be no help, so Heyst and Morrison have to import Chinese labour to work the mine. When the mining enterprise fails, one Chinaman stays behind and the 'white' settlement ends up by being inhabited by a Chinaman and a Malay woman-in a Swede and an English woman. a suitably lower social position-and There had previously been an Englishman, Captain Morrison, on the island, and finally the nondescript trio of adventurers Jones, Ricardo, and Pedro will reach it. Altogether the novel supplies us with a fair showcase of characters adrift in the world for no good purpose: from Schomberg, who can easily bring about private revenge on Heyst unheeded by any authority, to the fake-Italian Zangiacomo and his mixed company of shady lady-musicians; and the vindictive, but impotent Portuguese authorities in Delli on Timor island who impound Morrison's ship. A very small amount of money can clear his brig and his reputation alike and set him up as a merchant in the company of the disillusioned Swedish philosopher, himself the son of an embittered aristocratic expatriate to England. Heyst himself had been drifting around the Archipelago longer than anybody could remember, as the narrator Davidson remarks, apparently because this was the only place where he could live up to his father's teachings of absolute aloofness, of utter detachment from human bonds and feelings. Even this doctrine, a sort of Schopenhauerean asceticism, cannot save him from the chaos brought about 208 BIGNAMI:
10 See, among others, B. Johnson, Conrad's Models of Mind (Minneapolis, 197 I). Penetrating pages about Victory are also to be found in J. Batchelor, The Edwardian Novelists (London,
1982), chap. 2, passim.

HERO 209 AND THE DECADENT ARCHIPELAGO, in his life by human feelings. Suspicious of all human communities and all moral codes, he retires to his round island of Samburan and cuts off any ties with his fellow-creatures. His father's escape from Sweden to England had been a somewhat feeble act of isolation; only in a region devoid of all society can Heyst set up his rigorously ascetic rules. He manages to survive unscathed his first act of sympathy, the rescue of Captain Morrison, but when he makes a fresh 'departure from the part of an unconcerned spectator' in bringing Lena back to his island, for all his still living altogether outside society, he ends up with a 'wrecked philosophy', is impotent to face Schomberg's primitive emotional reaction, and commits suicide after Lena's death at the hands of the diabolical trio. Appropriately, a fire purifies the contagion of human feelings with which Samburan has been unhappily polluted. The doomed protagonist of Conrad's Eastern tales leaves Europe, the 'civilized' world, because he is unable to sustain the pressure of institutionalized human relationships, feels freer to wander in a region where no one will ask him to pledge his allegiance to any set ideal or faith, and is thereupon overtaken by a chaos he is now impotent to withstand; a paradox I hope later to reveal as being embodied in the character of Van Wick in 'The End of the Tether'. I have enlarged on Victory in order to stress that the Malay archipelago not only is the backdrop to but actually becomes a metaphor for the intellectual attitude of Conrad's heroes. In the earlier works that make use of the Malayan setting Conrad is busy telling the stories of particular men, and is concerned to disguise their autobiographical significances. But when he goes back to the East in his later stories, never having previously revisited it, he seems to develop a sentimental attitude toward the region and the memories it brings back of youthful action and adventure. This nostalgic attitude, in its fond outspokenness, appears to tell us far more about the effect of this experience on the writer than the earlier, more active one, ever did. Everything, I believe, is a little 'overdone' in the later stories. One has only to think of the increasing number of European characters adrift in the shallow waters of the East to appreciate Conrad's restraint on this point in Lord Jim or 'The End of the Tether'. But at the same time, as the background comes, so to say, more to the fore, one can better understand what the actual historical situation Conrad was making use of was like. not even one brought to Although he is a minor character-and believe some of the most typical traits of the a desperate end-I Decadent image of man come to life in Mr Van Wick, 'the white man of Batu Beru, an ex-naval officer who, for reasons best known to himself, had thrown up the promise of a brilliant career to become

JOSEPH CONRAD the pioneer of tobacco-planting on that remote part of the coast' 210
(p. 277).

BIGNAMI:

Although the 'reasons best known to himself' will later be shown to consist merely of an unhappy love-affair, it is really this wish of his to keep his personal history to himself that characterizes him and turns him into a somewhat 'flat' character: by 'flat' I do not mean that he if he were a figure in a tapestry instead of a is not worked-out-as statue, as is often the case with minor narrative characters-but rather that he embodies the man-without-a-past that all Conrad's Eastern characters would like to become. He intentionally chooses not to have a past-or, which amounts to the same thing, to do away with the one that he has-and this is why talking about 'digressions' rather than 'flash-backs' seems to me appropriately to define the pages in 'The End of the Tether' that deal with him. Chapter XII, which is wholly dedicated to him, just mentions the measure of Van Wick's Eastern past, eight years, but mainly establishes his present life and appearance. Not only is his dwelling described, but his whole his way of life-from European newspapers to soda-water-and clothing are presented in vivid detail. We are never told in so many words that he is a desperate soul, but this is made quite clear to us by his paradoxical attitude to the European world which he has so scornfully abandoned. He obtains from the aging Sultan, who lives across the river in his timeless world, as much ground as he can clear to set up a plantation, builds a house which is perforce of native design, and then fills it with European furniture and objects. It is as if, freed from the constraints of a Europe which used to impose upon him its own rules and customs, out there in the East-where, tries to make up a as I have said, every man counts for himself-he Europe of his own, 'to shore fragments against his ruins'. A better and more successful but equally faithless Almayer, not only does he receive by the tenuous link of the Sofala his mail and his newspapers, but over the years he has a piano and an etagere shipped out as well, along with all sorts of things down to the most absurd of all, the gravel for the path that goes from the riverside to his bungalow: 'It was a fact that the very gravel for his paths had been imported by the Sofala' (p. 282). It is also a fact that, in hinting at Conrad's intellectual autobiography, one can see that he himself feels any possible world of ideas tottering beneath his feet. He has no remedy to suggest, no way to point to, but keeps fondly and single-mindedly going back to a world of jungle unvanquished by European governments to stand for chaos unlighted by Western reason's ordering power.