Conrad and Empire



Conrad and

Empire

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 Conrad and

Empire

S t e p h e n

R o s s

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2004 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 08 07 06 05 04 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ross, Stephen, 1970– Conrad and empire / Stephen Ross. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1518-1 (alk. paper) 1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924—Political and social views. 2. Imperialism in literature. 3. Colonies in literature. I. Title. PR6005.O4Z7883 2004 823'.912—dc22 2003025860 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: Crane Composition, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Palatino, Pendry The University of Missouri Press gratefully acknowledges the University of Victoria’s financial assistance in the publication of this book.

 For Stephanie

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 Contents

Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1. The Heart’s Desire 30 2. Dereliction of Duty 65 3. Our Man in Sulaco 114 4. The Perfect Anarchist 150 Conclusion: Of Weak Idealism 186 Works Cited 197 Index 205

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 Acknowledgments

The Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and Queen’s University provided generous financial support which allowed me to conduct much of the research presented here. Parts of Chapter 3 have been presented at sessions of the Joseph Conrad Society of America at MLA conventions in 1998 and 2002; I am grateful to the participants and audience members of those sessions. The editors with whom I have worked at the University of Missouri Press, Clair Willcox, Jane Lago, Beverly Jarrett, and especially Gary Kass have been wonderfully kind and helpful. Of course, any errors remaining in this book are entirely my responsibility. Others whom I would like to thank for their encouragement include the members and officers of the Joseph Conrad Society of America, especially Carola Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White, as well as Kim Blank, Keith Carabine, Evelyn Cobley, Misao Dean, Jamie Dopp, Smaro Kamboureli, Edward Lobb, Andrew Loman, Joseph McLaughlin, Ella Ophir, Lori Pollock, Patricia Rae, Antje Rauwerda, Aaron Santesso, Yaël Schlick, Asha Varadharjan, and Jerry Zaslove. I would also like to thank David Leon Higdon and the other, anonymous, reader of my manuscript for their careful readings and incisive comments. I apologize to those deserving thanks whom I have neglected here; know that though your name may not appear your help was always appreciated.

ix

x Acknowledgments Glenn Willmott has as much of a stake in this book as I do, and I thank him profoundly for his attentive criticism, his measured advice, his ongoing friendship, and his faith in the project and me. Finally, I would like to thank all my family for their constant support and encouragement, and my father in particular for introducing me to Heart of Darkness. My wife, Stephanie, has provided love and support from start to finish—I thank her most of all.

Abbreviations HD LJ N NLL SA

Heart of Darkness, in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories Lord Jim Nostromo Notes on Life and Letters The Secret Agent

All references are to The Works of Joseph Conrad: The Uniform Edition, 22 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1923–1924).

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Conrad and

Empire

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 Introduction

In the course of writing seventeen novels, three plays, two memoirs, and many stories between 1895 and 1924, Joseph Conrad anticipated the twentieth century’s violent transition to global capitalism, the aggressively totalitarian tactics of fascism, the doublespeak George Orwell made famous as a tool of both fascist and democratic totalitarianism, the diminishing importance of government in the face of ever-expanding capitalist imperialism, and (most shockingly) the dehumanization attendant upon the establishment of a capitalist global hegemony. Yet despite this almost clairvoyant talent for social commentary Conrad also managed to produce some of the most compelling and penetrating of modern psychological tales. Frequently, he brought these two most-commented-on dimensions of his talent to bear in the same works. Such amazing breadth and depth of focus plays a large part in what makes Conrad continuingly relevant to us today, though it should perhaps not surprise us; Conrad’s tumultuous childhood and romantic (when not morbidly self-conscious) adult life no doubt made him especially sensitive to the interpenetration of the political and the personal, the ideological and the psychological, in all aspects of life. From earliest childhood, Conrad was intimately acquainted with the extent to which the personal and the political are continuous with each other rather than distinct realms. Born to Polish nationalist

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revolutionary parents, Conrad was only four years old when his father, Apollo, was arrested for his revolutionary activities and exiled to Vologda, in Russia. Sentenced along with her husband, Conrad’s mother, Ewelina, “was as ardent a patriot as her husband,” and joined him—under the same punitive conditions—with their young son. As a result, Conrad spent his formative years in conditions of isolation and deprivation, experiencing a further disruption at age seven when his mother finally succumbed to tuberculosis. The devastation wrought by the fusion of personal and political thus far in Conrad’s childhood was only reinforced as his father transferred the passion of his ardent patriotism into a “morbid religiosity” motivated by his obsessive grief over his martyred wife.1 As Apollo wrote to his cousins John and Gabriela Zagórski on January 18, 1866, “my life . . . is entirely centred upon my little Conrad. I teach him what I know, but that, unfortunately, is little. I shield him from the atmosphere of this place, and he grows up as though in a monastic cell. For the memento mori we have the grave of our dear one, and every letter which reaches us is the equivalent of a day of fasting, a hair shirt or a discipline.”2 Three years later, and four years after the death of his mother, Conrad lost his father to tuberculosis as well. The year was 1869, and Conrad was not yet twelve; he had spent two-thirds of his life in exile with increasingly ill and morbid parents as virtually his only companions and became deeply—if as yet obliquely—aware of the profound interimplication of the personal and the political. Following the death of his father, Conrad went to live under the guardianship of his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski for five years before leaving Poland for France, a move which would thereafter imbue the trajectory of his personal life with political overtones. Conrad’s adult experiences only reinforced this connection, as the vast geopolitical perspective he gained in his maritime careers as a smuggler, imperialist, and officer in the British merchant marine was balanced by his unremitting concern with “how to live” (LJ, 212) in a rapidly changing world. As a result, his writing at once takes in an unrivaled range of settings and problems while remain1. Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, 11, 19. 2. Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters, 1:16.

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ing focused on individual experience of, and response to, modernity. (I will return to and further complicate this already loaded term shortly, but for the time being I ask readers’ patience in treating it as an unproblematic marker of the combined forces of secularization, rationalization, pragmatism, cosmopolitanism, and late imperialism which characterized the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.) Taken together, these two elements— the social and the psychic—of Conrad’s work articulate a uniquely prescient conception of modernity not merely in terms of the existing structures and dynamics of nineteenth-century nation-state imperialist politics, but as a much more sweeping shift in orientation toward an era of extranational global capitalism. Though Conrad treats this set of concerns in almost all his work, beginning with Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and “An Outpost of Progress,” his exploration of the condition of modernity finds its clearest and most sustained expression in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. Representing four high points in Conrad’s major phase, these works illustrate more clearly than any other novels Conrad’s developing understanding and critique of modernity as at once intensive and extensive, subjective and objective. Taken together, they present a sophisticated and nuanced illumination of the central concerns that preoccupied Conrad throughout his career despite the extraordinary range of settings and situations through which he undertook to explore them. In this regard, they also serve as metonyms for many of Conrad’s other works, with each anchored in and anchoring the rest of the oeuvre: Heart of Darkness at once preserves the concerns of Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and “An Outpost of Progress” and elevates them to new levels of both particularity and generality; Lord Jim performs a similar operation on the concerns central to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” as does Nostromo for virtually all the work which precedes it and The Secret Agent for the awareness, repeated in “An Informer,” “An Anarchist,” and Under Western Eyes, that modernity produces its own antagonistic other within its own borders as well as without them (for as long as there is a “without”). Following the publication of Under Western Eyes, Conrad seemed more or less to abandon the critical attention and close scrutiny that characterizes most of the works of his major phase. With the

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publication of ‘Twixt Land and Sea, he turned away from the bleak conclusions of his investigation. Chance stands as a transitional text in this shift, as Conrad’s treatment of the equally (to him) alien worlds of finance and female subjectivity ends on a conventionally romantic note, and he leaves off once and for all any effort to deal imaginatively with the intensive operations of modernity. With works like Victory, The Arrow of Gold, and The Rescue Conrad turned to romance even more, coming full circle by returning to the exploits of Tom Lingard, the protagonist of his first two novels, as he finally completed The Rescue. The Rover alone stands apart from these novels of Conrad’s “decline,” and may be read alongside “Autocracy and War” as an homage to lost ideals. I will return to this novel in my concluding discussion of Conrad’s optimism and the relevance of “weak thinking” to his critical vision. For now, suffice it to say that The Rover’s Peyrol might figure Conrad himself as he leaves his home, hears news and talk of an idealistic enterprise, discovers that the ideals behind that enterprise are not only shattered but replaced by a barbarism they may well have concealed all along, and at last closes out his life by affirming the spirit of many of those same ideals despite his knowledge that they have been betrayed and may in fact necessitate their own betrayal. Though my discussion concentrates on the four main works of Conrad’s major phase, I hope that my analyses will provide ambient illumination of others of Conrad’s works and demonstrate reading strategies that will prove portable not only within Conrad’s oeuvre, but beyond it as well. Readers familiar with recent trends in Conrad criticism will no doubt note that this book differs from much prominent recent work on Conrad in that it does not accord pride of place to questions of nation-state imperialism, colonialism, or race in Conrad’s works. At least since 1977, when Chinua Achebe made the remark heard around the world by calling Conrad “a bloody racist,” much of the best criticism on Conrad has focused on a bundle of questions: Was Conrad a racist? Was he pro-imperialism? Was he pro-colonialism? Did he support English imperialism and colonialism while denigrating the practices of other imperial countries? If so, were his sentiments genuine or merely attempts to appease his English reading audience and cultivate his image as a naturalized Englishman? Should we at-

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tribute the strains of racism, imperialism, and colonialism we find in his work to him, to Marlow, or to any of his various narrative voices? To what extent can or should we identify Conrad with his work? So thorny a set of questions is further complicated by the fact that, as Andrea White has shown, Conrad’s attitudes changed over time. Moreover, Conrad’s thinking on these issues was profoundly and subtly influenced by a range of shifting discourses surrounding the emergence of the new imperialism in the 1890s; Christopher GoGwilt in The Invention of the West and Chris Bongie in Exotic Memories provide perhaps the most nuanced and compelling accounts of this dimension of the problem.3 Finally, the confluence of racism, imperialism, and colonialism in Conrad’s work is further imbricated with questions of class and gender. Though I do not take up these concerns in an explicit and extended way here, I do not reject them either. It would be unreasonable to deny that Conrad engaged deeply with the discourses of imperialism, and that our current understanding of Conrad’s work owes a great deal to the insights of the likes of Padmini Mongia, Peter Edgerly Firchow, Patrick Brantlinger, Edward Said, and Benita Parry.4 With that said, however, it seems that it is time to expand our scrutiny of Conrad’s work. However crucial the insights and critiques of postcolonial criticism have been to our developing understanding of Conrad’s engagement with modernity, they are ultimately inadequate to the scope and complexity of that engagement. Indeed, part of what I want to suggest in the following pages is that Conrad’s failure to be sufficiently critical of imperialism—whatever that might have meant in the first quarter of the twentieth century—is less a symptom of his complicity with imperialism than a 3. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 9; Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject; Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the DoubleMapping of Europe and Empire; Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle. 4. Padmini Mongia, “‘Ghosts of the Gothic’: Spectral Women and Colonized Spaces in Lord Jim”; Peter Edgerly Firchow, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent”; Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method and Culture and Imperialism; Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers.

6 Conrad and Empire consequence of his grander, more oblique, and less articulate concern with what we might now call incipient globalization. Put another way, Conrad’s engagement (or lack thereof) with imperialism as imperialism, though interesting and worthy of exploration, should no longer be taken as sufficient grounds for critique. Rather, it must be read as a symptom of his engagement with the emerging postimperialist modernity that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have christened Empire. In the last decade or so important steps have been taken in this direction by critics like Christopher GoGwilt and Chris Bongie. GoGwilt’s genealogy of the idea of the West as it appears in Conrad’s fiction provides some keen insights and genuinely useful starting points for considering Conrad’s encounter with modernity as transcending the discourses of nation-state imperialism. He argues that Conrad’s work progresses from dealing explicitly with nation-state imperialism in the Malay fictions to dealing with European modernity on its own ground in the late works of the major phase, particularly The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. In this regard GoGwilt is accurate, though he sees this transition as a movement from the mapping of empire to the mapping of Europe rather than as a dialectical expansion of consciousness whereby Conrad came to see through the field of imperialism to the larger, incipiently global, movement of Imperial modernity itself. Nonetheless, GoGwilt’s emphasis on the interimplication of the local and the global in novels like Lord Jim and Nostromo sheds light on how Conrad’s specific settings relate to much larger historical and cultural movements.5 Bongie’s reading of Conrad in Exotic Memories, though it appeared earlier than GoGwilt’s, represents a still more sophisticated understanding by pointing to Conrad’s presentation of “a truly global modernity [which is e]verywhere and in everything, . . . cancel[ing] out whatever might once have differed from it, reducing both the earth and those who inhabit it to a single common denominator.”6 Bongie’s emphasis on the totalizing dimensions and tendential undifferentiation of Imperial modernity as it was emerging 5. GoGwilt, Invention of the West, 127, 97–98. 6. Bongie, Exotic Memories, 149.

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around the turn of the twentieth century chimes closely with Conrad’s vision of modernity as a global phenomenon. Indeed, in these terms, Bongie’s conception of the modernity about which Conrad (among others) wrote anticipates Hardt and Negri’s more recent formulation of Empire as a global system of totalizing deterritorialization. There is a tension in Bongie’s analysis, though, as his focus on the new imperialism foregrounds not a world of undifferentiation but one of obsessive differentiation. As the transition in Heart of Darkness from Marlow’s childhood encounter with a map on which there were “many blank spaces” (HD, 11) to his adult encounter with the parti-colored map of the “scramble for Africa” reveals, the new imperialism was a process of relentless carving up of territory and establishment of boundaries, not homogenization and erosion of them. As Hardt and Negri point out, “imperialism is a machine of global striation, channeling, coding, and territorializing the flows of capital, blocking certain flows and facilitating others.”7 Bongie’s claim that the modernity Conrad experienced from the 1890s onward was already one of global undifferentiation is thus troubled by the differentiating operations of the new imperialism. Finally, whereas GoGwilt shows the moment at which the construction of the East runs into a limit and gives rise to the construction of the West, Bongie records a movement of exoticization which, for all its emphasis on undifferentiation and globalization, still adheres to a logic of flow from West/center to East/periphery. My point in teasing out this tension in Bongie’s work is not to attempt to discredit his contribution but to show that it does not go quite far enough in discerning the true range and depth of Conrad’s vision of modernity as emergent globalization. In fact, I would like to suggest that this tension is itself telling, revealing the disparity between Conrad’s contemporary reality (the new imperialism) and the qualitatively different historical stage emerging from and superseding it (globalized modernity, or Empire) that we find in his works. That is, Bongie identifies the principle of a truly global, truly undifferentiated world order as it appears both historically and in Conrad’s work, but he neither pushes it far enough nor sees the 7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 332–33.

8 Conrad and Empire emergence of such an order as the insistent (if unconscious) preoccupation of Conrad’s oeuvre. Indeed, a symptom of this aspect of Bongie’s approach is that he stops his analysis short at Lord Jim because he thinks that all the later works (particularly the “exoticist” ones) simply “testify to the same cultural malaise that the author of Lord Jim had diagnosed as incurable.”8 Some attention to the European novels like The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance, and even The Rover might have led Bongie to somewhat different conclusions, as I hope to show that the “cultural malaise” we find “diagnosed” in Lord Jim takes on complex and important facets when Conrad comes to examine it up close, as it were. These reservations notwithstanding, Bongie’s reading of Conrad is among the best I have come across; his focus on the contemporary realities in which Conrad lived and about which he most immediately wrote provides us with a crucially valuable perspective upon which to build. One of the aims of this book is to do just that, overcoming the narrow focus of much postcolonial criticism and reconciling the tension in Bongie’s analysis to reveal Conrad’s work as an early critique of what we now think of as postmodern globalization. A critical element of that project issues from Hardt and Negri’s conceptualization of Empire. Obviously, this study is nowhere near expansive enough to engage with all of the arguments in Empire, nor is it my aim or desire to do so. Hence, a disclaimer: Though Hardt and Negri’s study importantly informs my own, I remain ambivalent about its ultimate usefulness. On the one hand, Empire’s diagnosis of (post)modernity strikes me as compelling and effective. On the other hand, its program for liberating the multitude and turning the juggernaut of Empire on its head seems unrealistic. Such an attitude is inconsistent with my own temperament and, more importantly, diverges radically from the vision we find in Conrad’s works. Thus, though I make use of Hardt and Negri’s diagnosis of Empire throughout, I neither relate their programmatic utopianism to Conrad’s outlook nor see it as a viable alternative to the bleak vision that outlook provides. Rather, my study’s relation to Empire is that of a bricolage sanctioned by the authors themselves in their preface: “What we hope to have contributed in this 8. Bongie, Exotic Memories, 152.

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book is a general theoretical framework and a toolbox of concepts for theorizing and acting in and against Empire.”9 Leaving aside the implied injunction to use their work to act “in and against Empire,” I will nonetheless make use of the “general theoretical framework” and especially the “toolbox of concepts” they provide. Three concepts that I find especially compelling and useful in my study of Conrad and that inform my discussion here are the distinction between imperialism and Empire, the historical transition from regimes of discipline to regimes of control, and deterritorialization. Perhaps the most important point on which my study draws from Empire is the differentiation of imperialism from Empire: In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.

This distinction is crucial, as it provides a conceptual framework within which to differentiate between the imperialist world in which Conrad wrote and the incipiently Imperial world about which he wrote. In this respect, the variety of settings in Heart of Darkness (Congo), Lord Jim (Malaysia), Nostromo (South America), and The Secret Agent (London) represents an increasingly direct engagement with Imperial modernity as Conrad imaginatively moved from what was still at that time conceived of as the periphery of modernity’s global expansion to the center of its residual order. As GoGwilt puts it, “[Conrad’s] colonial fictions were from the start concerned with that fragmentation of European culture which is an inseparable part of colonialism, but from about 1905 this focus drew Conrad’s imaginative investment away from the map of Empire and toward the changing map of Europe.”10 Of course, the distinction between imperialism and Empire is 9. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xvi. 10. Ibid., xii–xiii; GoGwilt, Invention of the West, 16.

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neither absolute nor definitive; the transition from imperialism to Empire happened not in a catastrophic leap but over time, and continues today. As such, Empire shares with imperialism basic characteristics like business-government collusion and a global intention—the difference lies in emphasis rather than a qualitative shift. With regard to the former characteristic, it is certainly true that business-government collusion characterized imperialism from the outset, but until Conrad’s time the superior partner in this collusion was decidedly the government. Part of what Conrad observed and recorded in his fiction was the transition beginning to take place at the turn of the twentieth century as commercial interests started to supersede governmental authority in areas of development. For example, though the East India Company had been granted monopoly trading rights to India in 1600 and became a ruling enterprise in 1757, its rapacious activities were restrained by the British parliament’s Regulating Act in 1773 and it was eventually dissolved by Parliament in 1858. By contrast, King Leopold of Belgium’s governance of the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries virtually erased the distinction between government and commerce. In the place of governmental restraint over commercial activity, Leopold established commercial interests as the de facto principle of governance in the Congo, and either did not regulate commercial activity or else promoted it through governmental policy. Imperialism’s global thrust is likewise differentiated from Empire’s by a shift in emphasis and capacity. Begun as a quest for new goods to bring to market and new markets to which to bring goods, imperialism has always been driven by the basic capitalist imperative to produce more than one can consume and to sell the remainder; as nations’ productive capacities exceeded their consumptive capacities they naturally sought other consumers to whom they could sell the surplus. The natural tendency of this imperative is, as Lenin knew, toward global saturation as increasing productive capacity will (in theory, at least) perpetually seek ever-larger consumptive capacity. Two key differences separate this tendency in imperialism from its manifestation in Empire, however. The first of these is simply one of ability; whereas imperialism no doubt had a global intention, it lacked the wherewithal truly to penetrate all corners of the globe.

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By contrast, Empire has both the intention and the wherewithal. This distinction might seem to lack a difference were it not for the second way in which Empire’s global tendency differs from imperialism’s. Whereas imperialism relies upon the nation-state as its basic unit of political organization, Empire concentrates on the supersession of national interests by commercial interests in both the production of goods and services and the quest for markets and resources with which to continue accelerating the cycle of production/consumption. This shift is one of Hardt and Negri’s main points, and is also made in somewhat different terms by Arjun Appadurai. The rise of commercial authority in the twentieth century in particular (though beginning in the late nineteenth century) lies behind Hardt and Negri’s provocative claim that because “the primary factors of production and exchange—money, technology, people, and goods—move with increasing ease across national boundaries . . . the nation-state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy.” 11 This is not to say that the nation-state has ceased to exist or to be effective as a governing entity, but only to declare a fundamental shift in the way the world economy (political, ethnic, ideological) is organized and functions. The corollary to this shift, one of its chief symptoms, and the means by which Hardt and Negri detect a qualitative difference between imperialism and Empire is a reversal of imperialism’s drive to territorialization and differentiation. For all its tendential globalization, imperialism remained fundamentally a competition between sovereign nation-states, with the result that the surface of the earth was increasingly divided up for exploitation. We see this division repeatedly in Conrad’s work, but perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the parti-colored map—the different colors indicating different European nations’ holdings—that Marlow sees hanging on the wall of the Company’s main office in Brussels. By contrast, Empire is a wholly capitalist phenomenon which pays little or no attention to such national divisions. As Hardt and Negri say, it is “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule” which erodes, 11. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization; Hardt and Negri, Empire, xi.

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jumps, and shatters boundaries to the easy flow of people, money, technology, affect, and goods. I will elaborate further upon Hardt and Negri’s notion of Empire’s tendency to deterritorialization, but for now suffice it to say that in contrast to the highly differentiated world of imperialism, Empire produces a smooth surface, a world with only contingent boundaries if any at all. The only imperative is the flow of capital (however manifest), as Empire appears unwilling to settle for anything less than true globalization—that is, the possession and infiltration of the entire globe and not merely a strategic portion or even majority of it. The second concept that I borrow from Hardt and Negri’s “toolbox” (as they borrowed it from Foucault’s) is that of a historical transition from regimes of discipline to regimes of control: Disciplinary society is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices. . . . We should understand the society of control, in contrast, as that society . . . in which mechanisms of command become ever more “democratic,” ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens.

Foucault tells us (chiefly in Discipline and Punish) that the critical turning point at which regimes of control began to challenge regimes of discipline was the end of the eighteenth century. With the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 the character of Western society began to change so that order was no longer maintained chiefly by the sovereign’s power to dispose of the body of any of his subjects. Replacing that direct, physical instance of power was a less direct but equally effective means of “democratic” control. Social order started to be guaranteed not by the threat of physical punishment by the sovereign or his agents, but by the “jury of one’s peers,” whether manifest in public opinion, criminal prosecution, or civil litigation. Surveillance tended to become the most effective means of policing the populace and—herein lies its diabolical genius—of getting the populace to police one another and themselves. The carceral society was born, and scarcely one hundred fifty years after Jeremy Bentham died we today find ourselves on camera almost as often as we are off it. As with the transition from imperialism to

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Empire, this transition, or rather tendency, clearly did not happen all at once—it continues even today, and it is doubtful if it can ever be fully completed. The passage to the society of control does not in any way mean the end of discipline. In fact, the immanent exercise of discipline—that is, the self-disciplining of subjects, the incessant whisperings of disciplinary logics within subjectivities themselves—is extended even more generally in the society of control. What has changed is that . . . the disciplinary dispositifs have become less limited and bounded spatially in the social field. Carceral discipline, school discipline, factory discipline, and so forth interweave in a hybrid production of subjectivity.

The tendency from regimes of discipline to regimes of control remains crucially important, however, and Hardt and Negri characterize it as a critical aspect of Empire’s development of intensive technologies for producing and controlling subjectivities rather than merely disciplining them. This shift is critical to understanding the evolution of Imperial modernity because it reveals the increasingly pervasive and diffuse power of global capital to micromanage all aspects of individual and social life “through flexible and fluctuating networks” of command.12 As I have already mentioned above, deterritorialization is the third concept of Hardt and Negri’s (by way of Arjun Appadurai and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) upon which I explicitly draw. For Hardt and Negri, deterritorialization operates on three basic levels, though of course these levels are neither distinct nor stable: the global, the institutional, and the individual. On the global level, deterritorialization refers to the erosion of all boundaries in the creation of “a smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialized flows” which facilitates the movement of capital. As Empire overcomes imperialism, it breaks through the “straitjacket for capital” produced by imperialism’s division of “the masses of the globe” into “a myriad of conflicting parties.” It tears down “the barriers between the inside and outside” to achieve universal influence and freedom for production and reproduction. On the institutional level, this process 12. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23, 330–31, 23.

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translates into the demolition of boundaries between home and work, school and factory, asylum and hospital. This collapse of institutional differentiation means that “carceral discipline, school discipline, factory discipline, and so forth interweave in a hybrid production of subjectivity.” The imperatives that produce subjectivities thus also install themselves in those subjectivities. In the process, they replicate themselves through the productive activities of those subjectivities “like a software program that carries a virus along with it.” The “hybrid production of subjectivity” that results from this process constitutes the third level on which deterritorialization operates to realize Empire: the subjective. This subjective level of deterritorialization is an element of the “intensive” operations by which Empire cultivates both those geopolitical entities it has already subsumed through its “extensive” operations and the subjects who inhabit them. Empire thus extends its power “throughout the depths of the consciousnesses . . . of the population,” not only controlling but in fact constructing subjectivities.13 Hardt and Negri argue that these processes (the shift from imperialism to Empire, the transition from regimes of discipline to regimes of control, and deterritorialization) do not reach their culmination until our day, but I want to suggest that Conrad’s works function as early detection devices, obliquely registering the impending supersession of imperialism by Empire. That is, in a pattern repeated time and again as postmodernist theory rediscovers what modernist art already knew, Conrad’s close attention to the subjective as well as the political and ideological currents of his day captures the essential beginnings of what contemporary theory is only now announcing as the crux of our (post)modern condition. His is what Hardt and Negri identify late in their study as one of the “voices crying out in the desert,” announcing the advent of a new world order even when they lack the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus to name or conceive it.14 This is why the Conrad of the major phase almost obsessively presents us with a virtually unvaried depiction of imperialism as global-capitalist (rather than nation-statist), institutions in crisis, and international casts of characters whose hybridity often renders any accurate genealogy impossible. 13. Ibid., 333, 234, 42, 234, 330–31, 197, 24. 14. Ibid., 379.

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In addition to drawing on these diagnostic aspects of Hardt and Negri’s study, my effort to flesh out the details of Conrad’s engagement with Empire in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent is organized by three heuristics, each of which addresses some aspect of the interrelationship between the psychic and the social. The first of these heuristics is that of an organizing social principle by which Conrad metonymizes Imperial modernity in each of the novels—as, for example, the Company in Heart of Darkness or the Gould Concession in Nostromo. In my formulation of this heuristic, I use Slavoj Zˇ izˇek’s theories of the interrelationship between subjectivity and ideology. Drawing heavily on the Lacanian concepts of the real, imaginary, and symbolic as well as points de capiton, jouissance, and the law, Zˇ izˇek reads the phenomenon of ideology as a particular instance of the symbolic order that is subtended by a series of imaginary identifications (the “either/or” formulations of most ideological dogma) and periodically disrupted by the eruption of the sociocultural real. Following Laclau and Mouffe, Zˇ izˇek designates the real of ideological constructions as “antagonism,” the primary force of disruption and exclusion around which the ideological field is organized and which periodically returns to disrupt it. From this perspective, he returns to Lacan’s formulation that Marx detected a fundamental principle of the prevailing social order behind certain disruptions of the social field: Marx “invented the symptom” (Lacan) by means of detecting a certain fissure, an asymmetry, a certain “pathological” imbalance which belies the universalism of bourgeois “rights and duties.” This imbalance, far from announcing the “imperfect realization” of these universal principles . . . functions as their constitutive moment: the “symptom” is, strictly speaking, a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genus. . . . [E]very ideological Universal—for example, freedom, equality—is “false” in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity.15

In this formulation Zˇ izˇek enacts a genealogical narrative according to which Marx pioneered the hermeneutic method elaborated by 15. Slavoj Zˇ izˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 21.

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Freud and modified by Lacan (with the help of Hegel); Zˇ izˇek then returns to this method’s arena of origin (cultural analysis) with a greater capacity and more sophisticated set of interpretive categories. Whereas Marx believed that the fundamental antagonism of social organization (i.e., class conflict) could be overcome through the dialectical progression of history, Zˇizˇek draws on the Lacan-Hegel axis to posit antagonism as an elementary feature of subjectivity and hence a necessary feature of any intersubjective field like ideology. Zˇ izˇek argues that the creation of any unifying field of beliefs involves two processes that correspond to the way in which the subject constructs a unifying field of imaginary and symbolic identifications in the establishment of its own integrity and permanence. In ideology, as in subjectivity, a preexisting field of nonideological elements (the symbolic order) is “quilted” (i.e., pinned down) through the designation of certain signifiers (points de capiton) as indicators of truth. For the subject this process involves the articulation of desire via signification. The instance of the utterance pins down certain signifiers—for example, love, honor, courage, family—retroactively endowing them with meaning to create a momentarily totalized field of meaning. In this field the subject (re)produces itself by avoiding the void masked by the symbolic order. In the realm of ideology a similar process takes place in which certain signifiers are arbitrarily granted meaning of an order exceeding that of all other signifiers. These privileged signifiers function as points de capiton, pinning down a particular area of the nonideological field (the symbolic order) by claiming an inherent meaning that is more than simply the play of signifiers along the signifying chain; they have in them more than they are. As a concrete example of this process, Zˇ izˇek offers the way in which “Coke” becomes a signifier that contains not only Coke but “the spirit of America” as well.16 “Material interests” functions in this way in Nostromo, as does “duty” in Lord Jim, “ivory” in Heart of Darkness, and “science” in The Secret Agent. As with the points de capiton that situate the subject by positing an inherent meaning, the points de capiton in the field of ideology remain illusions despite their necessity. This illusoriness is revealed as the nature of the signifying chain returns to haunt this procedure. 16. Ibid., 96.

Introduction

17

Ascribing particular meanings to particular signifiers necessitates a reciprocal exclusionary action of something against which to define that field—if “Communism” signifies “freedom,” for example, then it also refers negatively to “tyranny.” This reciprocating action makes ideology necessarily an example of the “not-all” even though it claims to provide a totalized world view. The point of exclusion functions as a receptacle for all that is excluded from the particular field of ideology, but which its adherents also unconsciously recognize in themselves. Like the points de capiton of the ideological field, these signs of exclusion also become privileged signifiers embodying more than they are (the prime example for Zˇ izˇek, as it is for Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, is “Jew”) and serving as a catchall for every characteristic against which a particular ideology defines itself. This process is, in short, one of negative identification supplementing the positive identification undergone by all subjects of a given ideology. The problem that arises with this procedure is that it builds an element of “not-all” into the totalizing field of ideology and produces in the signifier of exclusion a symptom by which ideology may be diagnosed. That is, ideologies necessarily make universalist claims (even if those claims are about the universal validity of various competing worldviews) that are inherently untenable because of the exclusionary process by which certain signifiers are designated as points de capiton, pinning down the field of ideological signification. The negative signifiers generated by this totalizing process function as symptoms within the totalizing field of ideology, masking the fissures that interlace its universalist claims and disrupting its smooth functioning just as symptoms disrupt the smooth mental functioning of the subject. Likewise, this “social symptom”17 designates the unconscious of a particular ideological field (if it were conscious then the field would disintegrate) and is therefore also the reservoir of jouissance, the unbridled enjoyment of drives and instincts that is prohibited by their exclusion from the social sphere through the workings of ideology. Thus the excluded signifier is simultaneously an object of horror (as receptacle of all that is loathsome to the ideological field) and a marker of the seductive 17. Ibid., 21 ff.

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Conrad and Empire

objet a toward which the ideological field tends and from which it recoils through its organization of the symbolic order. At this point the law is invoked as the formalized and institutionalized version of the ideological field’s arrangement of the symbolic order, providing an officially sanctioned body to which the subjects of a given ideology can cede their enjoyment in the “virtuous” aversion from all that lies on the negative plane of the ideological field. The more complete the authority of the law, according to Zˇ izˇek (following Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents), the more obscene it becomes as a repository for an entire society’s jouissance, usurping and vicariously enjoying the transgressive tendencies put in place by its own establishment (there can be no transgression in the absence of a boundary to transgress, and no boundary without the possibility of transgression). Thus fascism—or Kurtz’s regime in Heart of Darkness—might be said to constitute both the pinnacle of totalizing ideologies and the height of obscenity in the law as it enforces a radical and irrational exclusionary ideological field and demands the utmost sacrifice of desire from its subjects, before reformulating that desire in the exercise of the law as control, repression, and governance. Finally, we should note that for Zˇ izˇek the illusory nature of ideology is no less “true” than the illusion of subjectivity is for Lacan; to claim otherwise would be to maintain that there is a reality from which the “dreams” of ideology and subjectivity keep us. Rather, Zˇ izˇek prefers the formulation of ideology that sees it as a fantasy construction of reality itself; it is the very principle according to which all that we recognize as “reality” is arranged. He writes: “[R]eality” is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the real of our desire. It is exactly the same with ideology. Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our “reality” itself: an “illusion” which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.18

To speak, therefore, of a reality that underlies ideology and which is masked in a pernicious manner is to fail to recognize one’s own po18. Ibid., 45.

Introduction

19

sition as always already ideological (we can see here the influence of Louis Althusser) and to fall into the trap of believing that one can step outside of ideology to a safe place from which to critique it as an illusion (Mannheim’s paradox). Rather than masking some base “reality,” ideology masks the real of the social field, the fundamental antagonism around which all such fields are constructed by the violence of their exclusionary procedures and which returns to trouble their totality in the shape of “social symptoms.” An understanding of this Zˇ izˇekian model of ideology can help clarify the means by which Conrad metonymizes the overarching ideological field of Imperial modernity through a variety of specific social organizations. In each novel the predominant social organization gives the larger, more diffuse, field of Imperial modernity a localized structure and content that facilitate depiction and critique. Each specific social organization is sustained by a manifestation of the law, whether codified or not, which interpellates subjects according to the demands of the social organization and enforces participation in that social organization. As “the set of universal principles which make social existence possible, the structures that govern all forms of social exchange, whether gift-giving, kinship relations or the formation of pacts,” the law thus provides the link between the codification of the cultural field and the configuration of subjects within that field.19 It draws on the power of a privileged signifier (ivory, duty, Coke), an ideological point de capiton that structures the ideological field by lending the appearance of immanent content to one ideal or another, and brings the psychic and the ideological together. As such, it determines both the cultural situation and the consciousnesses within that situation by capitalizing on enduring psychic dynamics (e.g., the paternal function, desire, repression, fantasy) to configure subjects amenable to the dominant social organization. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent are primarily concerned with the reactions of and consequences for individual subjects faced with the discovery that the law that governs them is in fact merely a structural effect of a particular ideological field whose adequacy to their situation is of little concern to anyone but themselves. This realization forms the thrust of Conrad’s rejection of most traditional political positions and lays 19. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 98.

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the ideological groundwork for his more specific treatments of how ideological imperatives infiltrate characters’ lives and configure their psyches. The second heuristic by which my analysis is guided is that of family romance. In its Lacanian usage, the family romance is the oedipal drama’s configuration of desire, prohibition, sublimation, and ego formation as it is played out between child, mother, phallus, and father. Freud originally posited the dynamic as being only between the child, mother, and father. Lacan initially accepted Freud’s description of the oedipal dynamic as tripartite, but argued from the 1950s on that it needed to be rethought as a quaternary structure, with the phallus or death supplementing the childmother-father structure. In the model upon which I draw here, the family romance begins in the preoedipal stage with the infantmother-phallus triad. The infant finds all of its needs and desires met in the mother (i.e., the mother is the phallus for him or her) and believes that the mother in turn finds complete gratification in the infant (i.e., he or she is the phallus for the mother). This triad is threatened as the infant enters the “first time” of the oedipal dynamic, perceiving that both it and the mother are marked by lack: the mother inasmuch as she desires (if she were complete, then she would not desire), the infant inasmuch as he or she cannot fully satisfy the mother’s desire. This discovery causes the infant to recognize that it is not the phallus for the mother and that the mother is not the phallus for him or her. As a result, it enters the “second time” of the oedipal dynamic, conceiving of an imaginary figure (the imaginary father) who at once blocks the mother’s gratification by barring her access to the phallus (i.e., by making her desire) and blocks the infant’s total access to, and gratification from, the mother. The “third time” of the oedipal dynamic involves the appearance on the scene of the real father, the figure who has the phallus the infant would have liked to be for the mother. The infant experiences this discovery as both relief and privation; it is relieved of the anxiety of trying to be the phallus for the mother, and it is deprived of the possibility of ever being the phallus for the mother. As a result, both the infant and the mother are irremediably marked by lack through the father’s perceived possession of—and prohibition of access to—the phallus. This prohibition is coextensive with the birth

Introduction

21

of desire, as the father’s interdiction (the non/nom du père hereafter referred to as the “paternal function”) marks the advent of the law and thus of the possibility of transgression. We should note, however, that this sense of the law as imposing an arbitrary restriction on the infant’s fulfillment is spurious. It is impossible for any subject ever to be the phallus for another subject; the paternal function merely encodes this impossibility as a social interdiction, so that the law of symbolic exchange that governs all human interaction is not simply a human invention but an unavoidable fact of subjectivity. Moreover, this appearance of the law, and thus of the infant’s need to express desire for that which is (permanently and necessarily— though the infant does not yet comprehend this) absent, drives the infant from the realm of imaginary identification into the symbolic order and the use of language. The dialectical counterpart to the prohibitions of the law (in both its psychic and social capacities) is the establishment of desire as a condition of subjectivity; prohibition establishes a limit in the very nature of which lies the possibility of and incitement to transgression. Finally, in Lacan’s conception as in Derrida’s, language only ever names that which is absent so that its every manifestation records the inescapability of desire. Subjectivity is thus a purely linguistic phenomenon arising out of the infant’s first use of language to name the absence of the phallus and establishing him or her as an entity permanently marked by lack—every attempt to name the infant only articulates its incompleteness, its lack as dictated by the law of the father. The crucial elements of this dynamic for reading the lives of some of Conrad’s characters are the power of the father to prohibit the infant’s enjoyment by enforcing the law, the consequent advent of desire (as the urge to transgress as well as the urge to possess), and the determining importance of discourse. These elements, along with Lacan’s emphasis on the “historical and cultural relativity” of the oedipal dynamic and his notion of the culture factor (facteur c) as “that part of the symbolic order which marks the particular features of one culture as opposed to another,” lay the groundwork for an understanding of subjectivity as ideological.20 Or rather, to be more 20. Ibid., 127, 59. On the culture factor, see also Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 37.

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accurate, they lay the groundwork for an understanding of subjects as ideological. Like the symbolic order, which is an enduring phenomenon of all subjectivity regardless of time and place, subjectivity itself is not marked by historical or geopolitical particularities. Individual subjects, however, are undeniably products of the very specific contexts in which they are produced. And though Lacan, like most psychoanalysts, uses the word history to refer to the personal history of a given subject, there can be little doubt that there is a fundamental continuity between that personal history and the larger historical currents in which it takes shape. Fredric Jameson has pursued a line similar to this in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” where he equates Lacan’s real with “History itself.”21 Even if we do not completely accept Jameson’s declaration, it seems clear that the basic elements of subjectivity may remain the same across time and space, but their particular emphases are no doubt importantly related, if not directly determined, by the specific conditions in which they pass through the infantile stages and enter the symbolic order. Employing Lacan’s notion of the culture factor to describe what we might think of as microclimates within the atmosphere of the symbolic order, we should be able to extend his account of subject formation to read the family romance as an apparatus for both (re)producing and registering ideology. Again, Jameson does something similar in his reading of Balzac in The Political Unconscious, paving the way for a reading practice that examines variations on the enduring psychic themes of prohibition, desire, and libidinal investment symptomologically, lighting on pronounced psychic and libidinal dynamics as symptoms of ideological pressures. In the context of reading Conrad’s major novels, this translates into scrutinizing family romance as the narrative of biopolitical production by which Empire installs and reproduces itself on the subjective as well as the geopolitical level. It is a particularly fruitful way of approaching the means by which Empire operates intensively as well as extensively. Hardt and Negri distinguish between the “extensive” and “intensive” operations of Empire. In its extensive mode, Empire expands geographically, subsuming territories that lie outside it and incorporating them into its organization. In its in21. Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” 104.

Introduction

23

tensive mode, Empire turns its focus inward and concentrates on cultivating the markets, populations, and subjectivities it has already incorporated through its extensive operations. Through biopolitical production, then, Empire extends its power “throughout the depths of the consciousnesses . . . of the population” so that it not only controls but in fact constructs subjectivities: “[T]he great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities. They produce agentic subjectivities within the biopolitical context: they produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds—which is to say, they produce producers.”22 For example, Kurtz’s genealogy as a product of all Europe speaks to Conrad’s concern with Imperial modernity as a transnational phenomenon, just as Kurtz’s excessive indulgence in the Congo follows directly from his fiancée’s family’s prohibition of his desire for her and his discovery that the law (both psychic and social) prohibits gratification on one front only so that it can facilitate it on another. The increasing complexity and focus of the family romances as we move from the prehistoric tale of Kurtz’s frustration to the central “domestic drama” (SA, 222) of The Secret Agent indicates a tendency in Conrad’s work of this period to recognize the importance of the immediate intersubjective situation of the individual as a key to understanding his or her response to the pressures of Imperial modernity. That is, given that public sociocultural pressures inevitably influence private psychic and relational dynamics (and vice versa), we can learn a great deal by reading each as in some way symptomatic of the other. To this extent, the heuristic of family romance fills out Hardt and Negri’s account of Empire, which, for all its rhetoric of desire, subjectivity, and the multitude, lacks a thorough treatment of the psychological dimension of Empire. It does this by providing a much more concrete and intimate portrait of how Empire impinges upon and produces the psychic lives of individuals. My exploration of this aspect of Conrad’s novels is thus in some ways the most important part of this book, as it seeks to show how Conrad’s works can supplement and extend the more sweeping vision of Empire espoused by Hardt and Negri. In this vein, Hardt and Negri’s description of Empire’s emergence 22. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 24, 32.

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as the transition from a disciplinary regime to a regime of control becomes relevant as a means of describing the ways in which Conrad’s characters experience the constraints (both internal and external) of their worlds. An understanding of this transition—and the means that it affords global capital to produce subjectivities—is crucial for reading the tantalizing and often enigmatic biographical sketches Conrad provides for some of his key characters. An alertness to the overlapping and supersession of disciplinary regimes by regimes of control allows us to see all the more clearly in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent a progression in Conrad’s understanding and critique of Imperial modernity: Though both the disciplinary and control models of subjectivation appear in all four novels, there is a marked movement from Kurtz’s encounter with the disciplinary power of the Company, through Jim’s initial experience as a subject of disciplinary society and later experience as an Imperially constituted subject of the society of control and Nostromo’s effective constitution as a subject of control, to the Professor’s impotent rebellion against both discipline and control. My analysis of how some of Conrad’s characters experience regimes of disciplinarity and control is guided by my third heuristic, that of an attempted transition from slave morality to master morality. Hardt and Negri point to the supersession of the disciplinary regime by the regime of control, but my exploration of the drama of slave morality will also stress their simultaneity, the overlapping and often complementary force they exert upon subjectivity. We see this complicated, often ambiguous, transition played out in all the novels as characters confront the disciplinary regimes by which they are governed, either submitting to them and then seeking alternatives or else trying to break from them from the outset. In the end, however, the disciplinary regime is not what the characters have to worry about because the regime of control has a much more insidious effect, rendering them constitutionally incapable of escaping its gravitational pull. We see this over and over as characters like Jim, Nostromo, Kurtz, and the Professor encounter the impossibility of such a break because of the pervasive, constitutive, and inescapable power of the emergent regime of control, which is superseding the more obviously oppressive disciplinary regimes of the residual order. The drama of slave morality comes last in my analyses because it

Introduction

25

brings together many of the insights generated by the first two heuristics, synthesizing them to generate a more complete understanding of the dilemma of modern subjectivity as Conrad articulates it. It is also the most complex of the three, however, and thus requires extensive commentary and elucidation. The terms slave morality and master morality are underwritten by and evolved from Hegel’s account of the masterly and slavish consciousnesses in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, but I draw them most immediately from Nietzsche. Master morality holds “that one has duties only to one’s peers; that against beings of a lower rank, against everything alien, one may behave as one pleases or ‘as the heart desires,’ and in any case ‘beyond good and evil.’” Slave morality, by contrast, appears “when the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: ‘let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just.’”23 In brief, where master morality depends on the individual’s right to act as he or she wills in full recognition of the fictional status of moral nominations like “good and evil,” slave morality turns upon precisely such nominations, delineating “good and evil” by abstracting characteristics of weakness and making them synonymous with “good” and abstracting characteristics of strength and making them synonymous with “evil.” One of the crucial elements of these terms is their attitude toward desire (a feature that exposes their Hegelian roots). Master morality exhorts individuals to “behave as one pleases or ‘as the heart desires,’” while slave morality insists that individuals “not requite” and “desire little from life.” That is, master morality encourages gratification of desire restrained only by what one’s will and power can accomplish, while slave morality encourages suspension of desire and deferral of gratification. Nietzsche sums up this tension when he articulates how the slavish would modify the behavior of the masterly: “[They would] demand of strength that it should not 23. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 396; Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 482.

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express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master.”24 Whereas master morality conceives of strength as able to gratify desire, slave morality conceives of strength as deferring such gratification in favor of future (imaginary) personal compensations. (There are immediate social compensations, including stability and security, but even these ultimately benefit those who occupy positions of mastery by stemming opposition.) This divergent attitude toward desire is fundamental to the conceptions of master morality and slave morality as Nietzsche extrapolated them from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, and provides the basis for my use of them here. My adaptation of these terms for a discussion of Conrad and modernity requires that I update Nietzsche’s conceptualizations in two ways, each of which both presumes and entails the other. The first of these revisions regards the nature of the imaginary compensations offered by slave morality. As Carola Kaplan has pointed out to me, slave morality and its politically quietist consequences have been around for much longer than has modernity; if we are to speak of it as an instance of the historically specific facet of Conrad’s critique, we need to discover the historical specificity of slave morality as it operates in his works. This specificity grows out of the secularizing tendency of modernity, a decrease in the religious temperament that Nietzsche sees as characteristic of slave morality.25 In effect, as the tendency toward secularization spreads with the rise of modernity, the prospect of compensations in the next world diminishes and is transplanted into this world. Clearly, this dynamic is similar to that described by Max Weber in his analysis of the evolution of the Protestant ethic into the spirit of capitalism, but it also differs from Weber’s account in that it includes all such millenarian thinking rather than restricting itself to one branch of Christianity: “[I]t reproduces the inhumanity of class society on a metaphysical and religious plane, in the next world, in eternity—of course with the signs reversed, with altered criteria and with the class structure 24. Nietzsche, “Genealogy,” 481. 25. Kaplan’s observation came following a panel on the centennial of Lord Jim at the 2000 MLA Convention. For Nietzsche on religion (specifically Christianity) and slave morality, see, for example, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 298, and “Genealogy,” 469–92.

Introduction

27

stood on its head.”26 With secularization’s diminished promise of some great reward in the life to come, the subject of slave morality seeks worldly compensation in the promise of a better life; by working hard, the virtuous subject of slave morality hopes one day to enjoy rewards like respect, dignity, education, a house, or perhaps even a business of his or her own. If the concept of an afterlife in which the subject will receive his or her reward is retained by secularized slave morality at all, it is only in the abstract and degraded notion that the virtuous hard work of one generation will lead to a better life for the next. In this regard we may think of slave morality as an ideology that persists in a secular form and even becomes its own justification once it is clear that the promise of reward goes unfulfilled more often than not—virtue becomes, of necessity, its own reward. Losing their sacred resonance, such notions as “pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility, and friendliness,” not to mention honor, duty, fidelity, decency, and honesty, become mutually (and self-) affirming values.27 In the Nietzschean scheme, even without their religious valence, these values constitute the very essence of slave morality inasmuch as they fabricate a moral and ethical justification for weakness, for lacking the strength to seize power and gratify one’s desires rather than being forced to see the suspension of desire and the deferral of gratification as gratifications in themselves. My second revision of Nietzsche’s concepts builds on this example and on Marx’s theory of alienation through labor, returning us to the status of desire by claiming that the ideology of slave morality is ultimately grounded in one’s alienation from one’s own desire. The Imperial laborer must bracket his desire for the products he produces, alienating himself from them not, as Marx would argue, as though they are reified bits of himself, but as though they are parcels of desire the gratification of which it is virtuous to suspend and defer. At this point the ideology of slave morality dovetails nicely with the Lacanian model, which posits alienation from 26. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, 191. 27. Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 397.

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one’s own desire (as a result of the family romance) as the irreducible condition of subjectivity. The specific modernity of this condition in Conrad’s works returns us to Kaplan’s observation that slave morality is an enduring feature of human culture; only with the widespread tendency toward secularization and the consequent diminishment of slave morality’s power to suspend desire and defer gratification do the conditions appear in which subjects of the ideology of slave morality can become aware of the extent of their alienation from desire as an ideological operation (i.e., alienation from desire is a fact of existence; the extent of that alienation is an ideological variable). In each novel we can trace a progression in the history of certain characters from a position of slave morality (becoming aware of their alienation from desire) through an attempt to accede to master morality (seeking to overcome that alienation), and finally to a collapse as the fantasy of mastery disintegrates (discovering that alienation from desire is inescapable). Kurtz, Jim, Nostromo, and even the Professor all proceed from adherence to a cultural ethic of submission to one of assertive self-referentiality (what one might call existential authenticity). In the end, however, the presumed mastery of all four characters turns out to be but a fantasy construction masking the slavish reality of their total subjection to the hegemonic systems against which they struggle to define themselves. This progression unites the social organization and the family romance of each novel, revealing how the two come together to articulate the interdependence of ideological and psychological fantasies as significant determinants of subjective experience. As a result, each novel articulates the recognition that the problem of slave morality and master morality is not simply one of individual self-definition, but is built into the very paradoxical exigencies of Imperial modernity as it demands that individuals simultaneously adhere to an ethic of righteous renunciation of desire and take up the challenge to become “self-made.” All three of the heuristics by which my discussion is arranged apply to all four novels, but there is a marked shift in the narrative means by which Conrad articulates his critique, a shift that necessitates a correlative shift in my use of the heuristics. As one might expect, given that they were written roughly concurrently, the critique articulated in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim follows a similar pat-

Introduction

29

tern, focusing on individual characters. This focus allows us to trace the social organization, family romance, and drama of slave morality in these novels while retaining a focus on Kurtz and Jim, respectively. By contrast, and following the intervening years in which Conrad worked on collaborative efforts with Ford Madox Ford, Nostromo presents us with a more diffuse engagement that necessitates reading the social organization and family romance of the novel through the figure of Charles Gould, while reading the drama of slave morality through the title character. Likewise, The Secret Agent shifts focus enough that we must turn our attention to the opening discussion between Verloc and Vladimir to establish the novel’s social organization, to Winnie for its family romance, and to the Professor for its drama of slave morality. These increasingly diffuse narrative strategies join the other transitions—from imperialist to Imperial settings, regimes of discipline to regimes of control, and crisis management to crisis prevention—that characterize these four novels and point to Conrad’s remarkable awareness of his moment’s own transitional tenor. Any ambiguity that remains regarding either these various developments in Conrad’s engagement with Imperial modernity or the heuristics with which I propose to tease them out will, I hope, be remedied over the next four chapters, which take up, in turn, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. More in the vein of close critical readings of the novels than theoretical flights that touch upon the works from time to time, these chapters attempt to ground the elaborate and at times complex context in which I have sought to position Conrad’s work. Following these readings, in a concluding chapter I will take up the issue of whether Conrad’s critique comes with an ethics. Though there can be little doubt that his vision of modernity is rather bleak, Conrad’s work might also offer us a limited, provisional, but nonetheless effective way to deal with what has variously been called the “pathology” (Habermas), “catastrophe” (Jameson), “crisis” (Hardt and Negri), and “iron cage” (Weber) of modernity. Conrad’s critique of Imperial modernity ultimately offers an ethics based on a “weak” rather than a triumphalist stance; in characters like Peyrol, Stein, and Marlow, he advances a response to Stein’s question “how to be?” (LJ, 214) that is not merely stoic but provisionally satisfying.

1

 The Heart’s Desire

Perhaps the central problematic in Conrad’s work is how individuals respond when they are confronted with surroundings and conditions that threaten to reveal to them the contingency of their accepted ideas. As we will see, the predominant reaction Conrad records takes one of two shapes: either a stubborn reassertion of old ideals that have been proven inadequate to the new situation, or the equally misguided adoption of a new set of ideals. Rarely, if ever, does a character so confronted recognize that his predicament devolves not from the particular set of ideals he holds or adopts, but from strong idealism itself. Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and even “An Outpost of Progress” all introduce this problematic, but there is, as Chris Bongie points out, a qualitative shift in treatment in Heart of Darkness. The rather pathetic situations of Almayer, Kayerts, Carlier, and Willems are transformed by the grandeur and implications of a figure like Kurtz, whose plight Conrad uses to cast into sharp critical relief the underlying assumptions, imperatives, and exigencies of Imperial modernity. As Ian Watt puts it, Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s nearest approach to an ideological summa [emerging] from the conflict between Marlow, in whom Conrad the seaman presents his lingering wish to endorse the standard values of the Victorian

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The Heart’s Desire 31 ethic, and Kurtz, in whom Conrad the seer expresses his forebodings that the accelerating changes in the scientific, political, and spiritual view of the world during the last decades of the old century were preparing unsuspected terrors for the new.

This aspect is certainly present in the earlier works, but it lacks there the forceful treatment and devastating scrutiny Conrad brings to bear in Heart of Darkness as he shows for the first time his capacity to critique modernity as at once an ideological system (and thus not the natural culmination of history) and a subjective condition. Set in the relative isolation of the Congo, Heart of Darkness allows Conrad to focus on the most salient features of the individual experience of Empire. This concentration and compression collapse the distinction between the realms of the psychic and the social, casting each in terms of the other to illuminate their interdependence and contiguity. Heart of Darkness thus, as Michael H. Levenson says, “imagines the point at which social life passes into the life of the instincts,” while at the same time providing “a theater for the psyche, not in an isolated individual, but in a social configuration that [gives] the mind an expanse on which to play itself out.” Levenson sums up this dual movement by stating that in Heart of Darkness Conrad “envisions that form of community in which social organization becomes psychological expression” (and, I would add, vice versa).1 This confluence of the psychic and the social provides the crux of my examination of Conrad’s critique of incipient Empire and his conception of Imperial subjectivity. From Kurtz’s personal experience of the ideological imperatives governing human interaction in modern Europe to the Company’s hegemonic governance of the Congo, Conrad both depicts and critiques the profit-driven arbitrariness of incipient Empire as it bears upon and transforms the individual subject. In doing so, he captures the features and accidents of subjectivity and subjective experience in the particular conditions of secularization, rationalization, and capitalist expansionism that constitute proto-Imperial modernity. In this chapter I will explore this treatment, with its potential consequences and alternative responses, as an instance of how certain notions of subjectivity and 1. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 148; Michael H. Levenson, “The Value of Facts in the Heart of Darkness,” 400–401.

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desire form the basis of Conrad’s exploration of the predicament of the modern Imperial subject. In Heart of Darkness the prevailing social organization is powerfully linked to the psychic situation through the symbolic order. In the primal scene of the novel (one that Conrad shares with his narrator),2 the young Marlow pores over maps while choosing the places he would most like to visit, lingering especially over the many “blank spaces.” “The biggest—the most blank, so to speak,” is the heart of Africa, the journey to which forms the occasion for his tale of psychological discovery (HD, 52). From the Western perspective that Marlow would have had as a boy growing up at the heart of the British Empire, these blank spaces are but undiscovered dominions, areas without proper social organization, civilization, or enlightenment. Their blankness suggests darkness as well, a chromatic expression of the feral character that resonates with the cliché of “darkest Africa” and that is routinely taken to be the “darkness” of the novel’s title. It is somewhat perplexing, then, to find that the exploration and mapping that take place between the time of Marlow’s youth and maturity appear not as an illumination, but as a darkening: “[B]y this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness” (HD, 52). Marlow alerts us to the artificiality of this process when he describes the changes made to the mapped area not as the filling in of representations of geographical features but as the advent of “lakes” and “rivers,” whose origin in symbolic fiat is reinforced by their association in a syntactic group with “names”: “It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names.” In both Lacanian terms and Marlow’s conception, the mapping of the blank spaces amounts to the construction, rather than the rendering, of geographical reality. Just as, according to Lacan, the application of the symbolic to the real produces reality as the organized world in which subjects exist, so its application to the undifferentiated spaces indicated by blankness on the map constructs geographical reality. This production of 2. See Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers,” 147.

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geographical reality is so elementary an operation that its result appears simply as rendering; it is an ideological procedure whose opacity masquerades as transparency. Reproducing on a geopolitical scale the production of reality through the application of the symbolic in the process of subjectivation, mapping here produces geographical reality by organizing the flux of the natural world. As I mentioned in my introduction, no particular concrete instance of the symbolic order is without its ideological implications; each manifestation of the symbolic order may be thought of as an ideological microclimate within the atmosphere of the symbolic order. In this case the ideological tenor of the applied symbolic order is that of proto-Imperial modernity as capitalist rationalization, characterized by monopolistic trading concerns driven by the profit motive and the steam engine (HD, 53). Conrad lays out this ideological dimension by linking the darkening strokes of mapping to the black ink used to indicate profit in accounting. A graphological counterpart to the delineation of lakes and rivers in the mapping process, the ledger-work of accounting translates geographical exploration into figures of profit. This connection is reinforced by the chief accountant, whose importance is signaled in part by his position as the gatekeeper to the river at the Outer Station. This important position combines with his ability to create order out of chaos to forge a conceptual link between the power of mapping and the power of accounting. This set of associations takes on the dimensions of a critique of capitalist modernity in light of the privileged position that Conrad gives to the Company over any political entity as the driving force behind, and the primary beneficiary of, the mapping process. Conrad makes a decisive point here, pushing aside the predominant conception of imperialism as a nationally driven endeavor to make a private for-profit enterprise the chief agency at work in the region. A good deal of the prescience of Conrad’s depiction is a direct result of Belgian King Leopold’s diabolical anticipation of governmentbusiness collusion. Making up for his relative lack of resources for the exploitation of the Congo by granting concessions to private business concerns (in exchange for a share of the profit), Leopold effectively bridged the gap between imperialism as a national interest and imperialism as a business venture, a transfer captured by Conrad

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in his radical reconfiguration of national imperialism in favor of the nameless Company’s trading concerns. In this context, Conrad mixes Marlow’s Englishness with the Company’s continental base to create a picture (and critique) not of nineteenth-century nation-state imperialism but of Empire as a burgeoning capitalist hegemony. The reality of the social organization thus produced by capitalist exploration and exploitation of the region is grounded in one particular signifier, a commodity that is of the essence of Africa and vital to European profit margins. That signifier/commodity is ivory: “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it” (HD, 76). As a commodity, ivory justifies the Company’s presence in the Congo and organizes the commercial (which is to say virtually all) activity in the region; it lures Kurtz there in the novel’s prehistory, sends Marlow after Kurtz, and even imagistically draws Kurtz’s fiancée into its web of influence at the novel’s close (HD, 157–62). Though ivory itself is clearly the material object of the Company’s interests in the region, its real power lies in its status as a fetishized signifier, a quasi-sacred point de capiton grounding the ideological field of “reality” as dictated by the profit motive. Marlow himself points to this operation when he restricts us to the realm of the signifier by directing our attention to “ivory” as a mantra rather than a material good—he does not even see any ivory until he arrives at the Central Station. Backing up the de facto potency of “ivory” to ground and organize the ideological field in Heart of Darkness is the establishment of a legal system around it. In this respect the Company’s profit-driven hegemony extends to a configuration of the law that corresponds closely to its Lacanian formulation in “The Function and Field of Speech and Language.” The most salient point of this formulation is that the law is at root the law of the signifier: “[T]he law of man has been the law of language since the first words of recognition presided over the first gifts.” The logic of substitution and supplementarity intrinsic to the operation of language permeates all aspects of social exchange for Lacan, from gift-giving through marital contracts, to the establishment of larger social pacts and treaties. In this regard, the Lacanian formulation of the law is both universal and local, transhistorical and contingent: it governs all exchange from the most basic offering of a signifier in place of a material item

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(first formulated in Freud’s explanation of the child’s game of fort/da) to the elaborate, multivalent, and locally variable fusions of the libidinal with the social and commercial in traditional marriage ceremonies (Lacan refers to “modern” restriction of the incest prohibition to mother and sister, for example, as an instance of a universal law)3 and the highly specialized terms of exchange involved in pacts governing social, commercial, and political prohibitions and licenses. The law in Heart of Darkness operates analogously, taking its universal dimension from the Company’s hegemonic governance and its particularity from the Company’s designation of ivory as the sine qua non of exchange—whether social, political, libidinal, or economic—in the region. It is the means by which the Company not only controls commerce, but also “gives identities, establishes purposes, [and] assigns destinies.”4 The Company’s power to dictate the law and thus to manipulate reality itself brings us back not only to Lacan’s emphasis on the law as the law of the signifier, but also to Marlow’s emphasis on “ivory” (as opposed to the material good, ivory) as the fundamental element in the ideological field he enters when he signs on with the Company and to the production of geographical reality in the novel’s primal scene. Taken together, Lacan’s theory and Marlow’s description bring to light the constitutive interrelationship between signification and desire in the ideological field of Heart of Darkness, even as they point to the larger field of modernity with which both Conrad and Lacan engage. Marlow’s insistence that the introduction of the law has brought about not order but criminality provides perhaps the best example of how the arbitrary relationship between signification and reality accomplished by the law informs the Company’s social organization of the Congo: “A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file toiling up the path. . . . They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea” (HD, 64; my emphasis). Again insisting on the primacy of signification, Marlow points out that the men are criminals only by virtue of the power of the law to call them such. The machine of the Company has exercised 3. Lacan, Écrits, 61, 66; for various aspects of social exchange, see 61–67. 4. Levenson, “Value of Facts,” 395.

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its prerogative of biopolitical production to in fact re-create their subjectivities for them according to the system’s requirements. The full absurdity of this designation of certain men as criminals according to a system of which they know nothing, and which they would not understand, comes out only much later, when Marlow attempts to make sense of the Russian harlequin’s assertion that the heads on stakes outside Kurtz’s hut are those of rebels: “Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels” (HD, 132). By association, Marlow links the logic behind introducing and administering the arbitrary law of modernity (nine-tenths of which concerns possession) to the “unsound methods” of Kurtz’s administration at the Inner Station (HD, 137). Prior to the advent of the law (and its enforcement by the Company), the men Marlow sees at the Outer Station could hardly even have been called criminals, let alone been criminals. Their subjectivities had been produced outside the realm of Empire and were—as countless colonial documents show—effectively incomprehensible to Empire’s methods of social organization. Empire’s appearance on and dominance of the geopolitical terrain of “darkest Africa” forever transformed the preImperial landscape, ethnoscape, and psychoscape by introducing a social order driven by the need for profit and a value system whereby there can be “something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter” (HD, 78). In one fell swoop, Marlow brings together the Foucauldian gesture of pointing out that the advent of the law necessitates the advent of criminality with the Nietzschean insight regarding the constructed nature of such concepts as “good” and “evil.” The connection between the arbitrary establishment of the law and the imperatives of the economic culture behind the Company’s hegemony in the Congo is solidified when Marlow stumbles into the grove of death only to discover that the “criminals” he saw on the path are in fact guilty only of being physically capable of furthering the Company’s interests. When this capability expires, as it has for the men Marlow sees in the grove of death, their sentence of hard labor becomes a sentence of death: “The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They

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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” (HD, 66). Neither “enemies” nor “criminals” to Marlow, these men are simply “helpers” who have outlived (barely) their usefulness. The connections between this arbitrary legality and capitalism’s need for a ready and cheap labor pool become even clearer in light of Patrick Brantlinger’s observation that “the ‘conquered races’ of the empire were often treated as a new proletariat—a proletariat much less distinct from slaves than the working class at home.”5 Marlow’s bizarre use of the term helpers at this juncture points to his difficulty in reconciling what he sees with the signification options left him by the Company’s lexicon: he can neither include the men among the law-abiding, since they have been deemed “criminals” by the authority of the land, nor call them “slaves,” since to do so would be to accuse the Company of behaving illegally itself. “Helpers” thus attempts to balance these two equally inadmissible options even as it exposes the dynamic of legalistic inversion at work in the Company’s governance of the Congo region. Interestingly, Marlow refrains from calling the figures he encounters “workers,” preferring the ambiguous and strikingly toothless designation of “helpers.” I would like to suggest that this reticence is of a piece with Marlow’s demonstrated sensitivity to the power and arbitrariness of signification; to call the dying men (or even their more lively counterparts struggling up the path ahead of him) “workers” would be to place them in the same category in which his aunt places him: “It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle” (HD, 59). Indeed, a recognition of the structural kinship between Marlow’s paid labor for the Company and that extorted from the “helpers” may be behind his rather lame lexical recourse, one that is equally vitiated by his refusal to call the “helpers” “slaves,” as they are. His equivocation, which rapidly gives way to a refusal even to recognize the “helpers” as human (“they were nothing earthly now”), marks a thinly masked aporia in the text. 5. Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” 182.

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Unwilling to follow the orthodoxy that describes the men as either “enemies” or “criminals,” Marlow is equally unable to refer them to himself as “workers,” and forecloses the possibility of calling them “slaves.” In the traditional order of punishment by labor, a law is instituted, the violation of which condemns the criminal to hard labor as a servant (rather than an “enemy”) of the state against whose laws he or she has transgressed. In this case the work is a corollary to the law, supplementing it as a reparative measure for the damage done or posed to the social organization by the criminal. In the Company’s inversion of this process, the demand for work is discovered first. The institution of the law is put in place not with the intention of ensuring the stability of the social organization, but to generate a captive workforce. It is legislated slavery accomplished according to the arbitrary logic of signification and the potency of speech acts. Marlow’s inability to assimilate the truth of the situation at this point in the narrative indicates the difficulty of Conrad’s critique as it strives to emphasize the extent to which modernity’s recognition of the arbitrariness of the law can give way to its appropriation by vested interests. By first insisting on Marlow’s sensitivity to the operations behind signification and then depicting a crisis of that sensitivity at a crucial moment in Marlow’s initiation into the corporate culture of the Company, Conrad sets down a prescient vision of the law’s appropriation by purely economic interests as Empire supplants imperialism on the world stage. The underlying principle of the law as it operates in Heart of Darkness, and the source of its relevance for my reading, is the imperative to suspend and defer gratification of desire, to subordinate the individual will-to-gratification to the larger corporate (social) will—that is, to produce docile, easily managed subjects. In this regard, the law generated by the Company, which sanctions its activity, bears a striking similarity to the psychic law as experienced by the infant at the point of entry into the symbolic order. The action that prompts the transition from primary narcissism to subjectivity is the father’s command that the infant contain his or her gratification of desire for the mother; it is a self-enforcing and self-validating limitation of gratification that is based ultimately on the father’s right to enjoy gratification before and in excess of the infant’s grati-

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fication. In both the social and the psychic situations, compliance with this command (though enforced with the threat of destruction) is rewarded by admission to the community—whether the human community bound together by the symbolic order or a more circumscribed ideological community. By this mechanism, the containment of the will-to-gratification is imbued with ethical, even moral, value; it is an individual sacrifice that serves the greater good of the community. This doubling and the problems that arise when desire is divested of all regulatory forces (i.e., when the father has no limitations on his own gratification, or when a particular corporate or social entity behaves without restriction) forms the crux of both Lacan’s and Conrad’s engagement with modernity. It suggests not only similarity but also continuity between the psychic and the social, and articulates the basic interdependence that structures and textures Heart of Darkness. From the semiautobiographical primal scene in which Marlow first registers the “blank spaces” on the map of Africa to his participation in the darkening work of imperialist exploration, Conrad creates a microcosmic vision of modernity in Heart of Darkness. He posits incipient Empire as the horizon of the social organization by making the Company, rather than any nation, the chief power in the land. This drives home the implications of the ideologically motivated constructedness of this social organization by focusing on the Company’s power as the origin, arbiter, and executor of the law. Starting with the Company’s ability to create an entire class of “criminals” by discursive fiat, Conrad repeatedly draws our attention to how such constructions not only displace people and despoil landscapes, but also actually produce subjectivities. This final step in the establishment of a social organization, the ideological field on which the narrative unfolds, sets the stage for a closer consideration of how that ideological field impinges upon those to whom its basic principles seem inevitable, if not natural and just—people like Marlow, Kurtz, and Kurtz’s fiancée. Though it takes place most obviously on a broad, extensive scale as outlined above, the critique of modernity in Heart of Darkness finds its most compelling articulation in the intensive narrative of libidinal desire and disrupted family romance that subtends the tale of Kurtz’s disintegration. In the background of the narrative of

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Marlow’s journey up the river to fetch Kurtz is a domestic setting that accounts not only for Kurtz’s original decision to go to the Congo, but also for his erratic and finally fatal behavior once there. Critics routinely deal with this intensive dimension of Empire in the novel by quoting Marlow’s statement that “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (HD, 117) as though this alone were adequate to explaining Kurtz’s psychological makeup. In the process, they ignore additional concrete information with which Marlow provides us. Perhaps the most striking feature of this background is that there is no mention of Kurtz’s father, and his mother is mentioned only when she dies, attended, significantly, by Kurtz’s fiancée, the Intended. This truncated family narrative does not explicitly tell us a great deal about Kurtz’s background, but it does offer a suggestive starting point by thrusting the Intended to the forefront of the Kurtz family romance. Initially, the absence of a father places the full burden of Kurtz’s psychic history on his mother; when she dies in the company of his Intended, the family romance passes into a state of suspension supported entirely by the Intended. In the absence of any siblings, and with the death or absence of the parents, the Kurtz family romance is threatened with a final discontinuity and the Intended is cathected with the entire libidinal burden of familial continuity. While this is far from a unique situation (the perpetuation of family lines devolves onto individuals, particularly individual women, all the time), Conrad makes the most of it as the narrative it sets in motion underwrites and counterpoints the surface plot of modernity’s proto-Imperial excesses. Perhaps the chief way in which Conrad draws our attention to the importance of the libidinal register of the novel is through his insistent recourse to calling Kurtz’s fiancée simply “his Intended.” Conrad capitalizes on this overt signification by wedding it to the commentary on signification and its role in constructing the reality we encounter (whether narrative or concrete), which he has already undertaken through Marlow’s difficulties with the incommensurability of signification. The word intended carries a sense of deferral and suspension of desire that backs up the more subtle commentary on signification and desire encoded in Marlow’s uncertain use of inadequate or overly general signifiers. As an embodiment of intention as yet unfulfilled, the Intended captures the narrative’s basic

The Heart’s Desire 41 concern with the deflections, deferrals, and suspensions of desire, becoming “the source of the momentum energizing [Kurtz’s] mistaken mission; in short, his intention.”6 Further, the signifier Intended functions as a rigid designator, at once marking Kurtz’s fiancée’s place in the symbolic order surrounding Kurtz (she has, apparently, no existence apart from her function as his betrothed) and defining her; it is the essence of her subjectivity as a signifier for other signifiers. Her status as “Intended” is, in effect, an existential condition that fixes her in a state of suspended gratification. Moreover, this suspended gratification is not her own, but that of Kurtz, in relation to which she is the ever-receding end point. The specificity of Kurtz’s narcissistic insistence on possession resonates with the cultural emphasis on possession encoded in the institution of the law, suggesting some continuity between personal subjective desire and its cultural and institutional counterpart. Conrad works with this suggestion of continuity by having Kurtz speak of “his Intended” in the same breath as he speaks of “his ivory,” making her the libidinal counterpart of the commercial ivory (HD, 116). The generality accorded by her anonymity subtends the specificity of her role in relation to Kurtz by making her an almost allegorical figure of Empire’s interference with the libidinal lives of its subjects. The capitalization of Intended recalls Marlow’s sardonic reference to his aunt’s characterization of him as “one of the Workers, with a capital—you know,” and aligns Kurtz’s fiancée with other characters who are defined only generically by their roles in the Company, like the accountant, the manager, the general manager, and the various professionals aboard the Nellie. The emphasis on the signifier that underwrites so much of the novel thus also comes to the fore here, as Intended functions on both the subjective and the cultural levels, inscribing the logic of signification and desire into the fabric of Marlow’s narrative on a level at once intensely personal and diffusely general. This emphasis on the power of signification to structure reality also points to the ways in which it can mask certain unpalatable features of reality. Just as the law of the Company designates those it needs for slave labor as “criminals” in order to maintain a ready 6. Robert S. Baker, “Watt’s Conrad,” 342.

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workforce, so the formal designation of Kurtz’s fiancée as “his Intended” masks the economic imperative that keeps their relationship from consummation and sustains them both in situations of perpetually suspended and deferred desire. When Marlow goes to visit the Intended near the end of the narrative, he tells us, “I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there” (HD, 159). The very language of this description calls to mind a bank’s rejection of a loan application on the basis of insufficient collateral, revealing the literal bottom line, the vulgar economic principle behind Kurtz’s decision to go to the Congo. For all his “burning noble words” about exerting “a power for good practically unbounded” (HD, 118), Kurtz also—if not primarily—goes to the Congo to make his fortune. Further, Marlow gives us good reason to believe that though Kurtz may have been poor all his life, it was not until his poverty kept him from marrying the woman of his choice that he became impatient enough to undertake such a desperate enterprise. Though it is almost glossed over in Marlow’s narrative, this detail points to a fundamental strain in the novel: Kurtz is first and foremost a victim of the impingement of Imperial economic imperatives into the libidinal life of the subject. His desire for the Intended is thwarted by class considerations that ultimately come down to money; in response, he undertakes a particularly dangerous but promisingly lucrative enterprise to earn the satisfaction of his libidinal desire—all under the sign of such “honorable intentions” as serve to assuage public uneasiness about imperialism and private qualms about not only the pursuit of sexual gratification, but social status and respectability as well. Initially evaluated in monetary terms, being designated as “not good enough” because he is not rich enough, Kurtz unthinkingly buys into the very system that so reduces him. That is, he not only ties his own worth to his financial wherewithal, but also makes the Intended into a commodity, the right to enjoyment of which he can earn. Accepting the notion that success as a human being is tied to financial success, Kurtz goes off to become a self-made man, intend-

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ing to use the machinery of capitalist social climbing as a means to the end of his libidinal desire. The interrelatedness between the registers of libidinal and economic desire suggested by this motivation is borne out by Kurtz’s equation of “his Intended” with “his ivory.” Faced with the indefinite deferral of his libidinal desire, Kurtz devotes all his energy to procuring ivory, believing that the satisfaction of his personal desire is inextricably tied to his generation of wealth (on which he earns percentages) for the Company. However, Kurtz gives himself over to this pursuit so wholeheartedly that he ends up capitulating to the logic of the very imperative that frustrated his desire in the first place. Initially seeking the satisfaction of his desire, Kurtz makes a Faustian deal with the Company and enters the realm of capitalist desire and production in which there is no such thing as satisfaction, but only the perpetuation of desire. Kurtz thus exemplifies the interplay between historically specific social forces and enduring psychic processes; in his journey towards “the horror” he experiences the historically specific capitalist exploitation of the enduring psychic reality of desire. Leaving the Intended suspended at home as an indicator of the frustrated desire that has now found a fresh and seemingly boundless outlet in economic activity, Kurtz submits to the logic of Imperial capitalist desire, eschewing all restraint in the full-scale and full-time pursuit of satiation. When he gets to the Congo, however, Kurtz finds not an extension of the social organization he left back in Europe, but its most elemental form where “rational acquisition becomes irrational hoarding, where economic routine becomes primitive ritual, where a commodity becomes a fetish, and where indirect violence becomes overt barbarianism.”7 Generations of critics are right to assume that what happens to Kurtz next is that he loses all restraint; what they have missed is that the “colossal scale of his vile desires” (HD, 156) as they are unleashed by this lack of restraint is continuous with the desire he feels for the Intended, which is stifled by his penury. The monstrous desires in which Kurtz indulges while warlord of the Inner Station are the direct result of his frustrated desire for the Intended as it is exacerbated by his “comparative poverty”; it is no accident 7. Levenson, “Value of Facts,” 399.

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that the two chief outlets of his desire while in charge of the Inner Station are sexual license and the procurement of “more ivory than all the other agents together” (HD, 113). While the point that Kurtz devotes himself to procuring ivory and producing wealth both for the Company and himself needs little arguing, there is decidedly less evidence for my contention that the other main outlet of Kurtz’s desire is sexual license. In the absence of direct textual evidence for this assertion, I would turn our attention to the figure of the African woman, Kurtz’s concubine at the Inner Station. Described only as “wild and gorgeous . . . savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent” (HD, 135–36), the African woman is clearly presented in conventional imperialist terms as a figure of unbridled, uncivilized passion and lust. That she is a favorite of Kurtz’s and most likely his sexual partner as well is suggested by the fact that she has “the value of several elephant tusks upon her” (HD, 135). Given that the stockpile of ivory Kurtz has hoarded leads Marlow to comment that one “would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country” (HD, 115), the African woman’s ivory adornments point to the same kind of equation of wealth and libidinal desire that characterizes Kurtz’s earlier relationship with the Intended. Whereas he had been prevented by his economic situation from giving the Intended the all-important gift of a ring, however, he clearly encounters no such resistance from the “people” of the African woman. The cleverly masked vulgar terms of his frustrated attempts to possess the Intended are here revealed, as the “primitive” nature of Kurtz’s concubine allows Conrad (in complicity here with imperialist ideologies of racial difference and what Bongie calls “imperialist exoticism”) to expose the connection between libidinal and material accumulation. This combination, taken with other testimonies of Kurtz’s unrestrained gratification of his “various lusts” and “monstrous passions” (HD, 131, 144), indicates that he does not simply halt at the satiation of his lust for wealth when the opportunity to transform that wealth into libidinal satisfaction presents itself. Finally, the simple binary of African woman/Intended combines with the associative logic of enjoyment/repression to suggest that the African woman stands as much for the (uncivilized and narcissistic) gratification of libidinal desire as the Intended stands for its

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(civilized and neurotic) suspension and deferral. Indeed, Tony E. Jackson points out that, at least within the lexicon of representations current at Conrad’s time, the savage per se (of which the African woman is presumably a particular instance) embodies “the fantasy of a pre- or rather non-Symbolic consciousness, of a condition wherein desire is immediately satisfied, wherein being is pure and unmediated by culture. This representation figures the savage as living, relative to Western industrial civilization, in a state of jouissance.”8 In direct opposition to the restrictively civilized conduct of the Intended and her family, the African woman truly does embody jouissance, and her close association with Kurtz indicates not only that he has attempted to gratify his libidinal desire as well as his economic desire, but that he has discovered something essential about the nature of desire itself in the process. Indeed, I would like to suggest at this point that the twin forces of libidinal and economic desire that crisscross in Kurtz lead him to a discovery of the nature of desire so profound and troubling that it prompts his famous last words. In the increasingly unbridled gratification of his “various lusts” Kurtz gradually becomes possessed by what Marlow calls “the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness— that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. . . . This alone . . . had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations” (HD, 144). Supported in this “spell” by a social organization that encourages lawlessness so long as it is profitable, Kurtz manages to exceed even the loose limits of laissez-faire profiteering. His “unsound methods” are tolerated so long as he continues to ship ivory with the correct paperwork (the “invoice” that so infuriates the manager at the Central Station [HD, 90]) and to buy supplies from the Company stores— that is, so long as they coincide with Empire’s extensive project of geopolitical domination. When he withholds ivory and repudiates the Company’s monopoly on supplies (as when he comes partway downriver but turns back without obtaining fresh supplies from the Central Station [HD, 90]), however, Kurtz is deemed to have gone 8. Tony E. Jackson, The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce, 102.

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too far. Only then does the extremity of his transgression extend beyond simply breaking the law to eschewing law together; he becomes not an outlaw, but utterly unlawful. Nearing the end of his pursuit of desire, Kurtz leaves behind the restrictions of social organization altogether and gives in to the seductive spell of instinctual gratification: “[I]t had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own” (HD, 115). Essentially experiencing a regression to primary narcissism through the gratification of his every desire—as encouraged and facilitated by the Company’s profit ethic—Kurtz rediscovers the instincts of unfettered desire in all their violence and uncompromising demand for unmitigated, uninterrupted, and undiluted jouissance. Indeed, Marlow’s description reads like a proto-Lacanian account of what might happen to an adult who managed to psychologically devolve back far enough to remember the undifferentiation and total identification of the self with the gratification of one’s desires that is characteristic of the presymbolic infant. Yet Kurtz is unable finally to complete this regression, just as he is ultimately unable to satiate his desire. He finds instead that the loss that drives him relentlessly onward in his quest for the elusive objet a is irremediable, just as there is no such thing as enough ivory to satisfy the Company’s demand. Marlow points to this conclusion as he speculates on the meaning of the heads Kurtz has mounted on stakes outside his hut: “They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last” (HD, 131). Demonstrating characteristic astuteness, Marlow hits on the crux of Kurtz’s tragedy: the discovery that desire remains insatiable because it originates from a deep psychic wound that no object or succession of objects can ever heal. The “something wanting” in Kurtz is at base the déhiscence of subjectivity, the gap between signifier and signified which, according to Lacan, structures and drives subjectivity. As Marlow extends his consideration of the nature of Kurtz’s tragedy, he approaches even closer to articulating this conclusion outright as he makes a connection between the “spell” that enchants

The Heart’s Desire 47 Kurtz and his discovery of the fundamentally fractured nature of the mature psyche: “[T]he wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core” (HD, 131). Having exhausted the external channels for satiation of his desire (the “fantastic invasion”), Kurtz is finally deflected into looking into himself for the answer to the enigma of desire. When he does so, he plays out a dramatic crisis of subjectivity as he takes introspection to its logical conclusion, glimpsing the abyss of human subjectivity and seeing in his final moment of extremity that jouissance and death are one and the same end of desire. This insight constitutes the substance of the vision that prompts Kurtz’s famous “whispered cry” (HD, 156). Marlow contextualizes Kurtz’s last words with a terminology and conceptual apparatus for reading his insight as the culmination of a lifelong pursuit of desire: It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—“The horror! The horror!” (HD, 149; my emphases)

Beginning with the age-old image of blinding insight (which recalls the blindfolded woman holding a candle in Kurtz’s sketch [HD, 79]), Marlow focuses on vision as the primary modality of Kurtz’s “supreme moment of complete knowledge”: he cries out at “some image, at some vision” that has “the appalling face of a glimpsed truth” (HD, 151), and not at some notional, conceptual, or ideational truth. Part of the reason for this, I would suggest, is that the vision Kurtz has is a glimpse of the hollowness within himself, of the death drive behind the incessant movement of desire; as such, it remains beyond the reach of symbolization and beyond articulation. Marlow himself addresses this inadequacy shortly before he recounts Kurtz’s final words when he expresses his frustration at

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trying to convey the real sense of his experience: “I’ve been telling you what we said—repeating the phrases we pronounced—but what’s the good. They were common everyday words—the familiar vague sounds exchanged on every waking day of life. But what of that? They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares” (HD, 144). As Marlow indicates, Kurtz’s final vision is of the nothingness, the pure and irremediable absence at the heart of subjectivity, posited by Lacan, a truth that is made available to him only through his approach to the historically specific kernel of antagonism at the core of capitalist society.9 Marlow supplements this suggestion by tying Kurtz to the ivory that has formed the primary object of Kurtz’s desire during his time in Africa. This alignment draws on the inevitable association of ivory collection with death to depict Kurtz as an embodiment of the death that lurks in the jouissance of desire. This confluence of apparently opposite extremes is reinforced finally in the succession of expressions that pass over Kurtz’s “ivory” face (“pride . . . power . . . craven terror . . . hopeless despair”) as he approaches the moment of extremity in which he has his definitive vision. Eyeballs rolling up in the moment of death as they do in the moment of jouissance, Kurtz has a vision of the void at the core of subjectivity and expresses it the only way he knows how, not by describing it, but by crying out a warning that applies equally to the transhistorical structuration of subjectivity and to the historically specific system that exploits and reconfigures that structuration. The circuit of desire that reaches, to borrow from Marlow, “the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of experience” (HD, 51) in Kurtz’s final moments is finally completed as Marlow returns to its starting point by visiting the Intended. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Intended when we finally meet her is her stasis. In contrast to both Kurtz’s and Marlow’s physical and psychological journeys, the Intended has a deathly demeanor that is indicative of her arrested situation: “She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk” (HD, 156–57). Her embodiment of the principle of suspended 9. See Ernesto Laclau, preface to The Sublime Object of Ideology, by Slavoj Zˇ izˇek, xi.

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and deferred desire in the primal scene that drove Kurtz to the Congo is reinforced: [S]he was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together—I heard them together . . . my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his eternal condemnation. (HD, 157)

Seemingly impervious to the passage of time—which is perhaps the most immediate experience we have of the movement of desire (the variations in durée relative to one’s desire)—the Intended quite literally lives the suspension of desire that she represents in the narrative’s exploration of its dynamic. Having waited for Kurtz long enough to outlive his mother, the Intended finds that her position as the object of Kurtz’s desire fossilizes with his death. The mausolean atmosphere in which she lives penetrates Marlow’s consciousness so that he not only experiences a collapse of time akin to the Intended’s, but also senses that he has stumbled onto the ground of death (or the entropic suspension of desire that may even be worse than death), which he experiences as a diluted version of Kurtz’s final vision: “I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold” (HD, 157). The Intended’s drawing room apparently correlates precisely enough to Kurtz’s dying vision to provoke a sense of panic in Marlow, and he finds that despite his effort to draw his foot back from the abyss into which Kurtz stepped he has somehow ended up in practically the same place. Indeed, immediately before he enters the Intended’s house, Marlow has a vision of Kurtz “on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind . . . a shadow insatiable.” This vision “seem[s] to enter the house with” Marlow (HD, 155) as though the unrestrained instinct unleashed by Kurtz was mounting an invasion of the sanctuary of suspended desire that is the Intended’s

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abode: “It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul” (HD, 156). Finally the setting is complete as Marlow recalls Kurtz’s final words both as a foreshadowing of the lie he will tell the Intended about those words and as a powerful indication that he is about to encounter a vision of what they signify. All of these images, memories, and motifs come together at last as Marlow, having seen the conclusion of Kurtz’s obsessive pursuit of desire, now arrives at its origin only to discover that the Intended, in her full allegorical significance, is in fact coterminous with the horror of Kurtz’s final vision. Coded into the tale of Marlow’s quest, the tale of Kurtz’s being driven to the Congo by his frustrated desire for the Intended provides a domestic, libidinal undercurrent to the narrative. The Intended, cathected with Kurtz’s desire, is the crucial element in this narrative and its vital link to the novel’s broader ideological dimension. In the novel’s symbolic economy, she is cast as the libidinal equivalent to the ivory: Kurtz is in the Congo only to earn enough money to be granted her hand in marriage. She bears the libidinal burden of the Kurtz family narrative, and her appellation itself ties her into the dynamic of deferred desire (physically, economically, and semantically). This equation reaches its culmination when Conrad exposes the interdependence of capitalist and libidinal desire in Kurtz’s twin obsessions with producing more ivory than all other agents combined and with indulging the sexual license made available to him by his concubine at the Inner Station. Finally, Kurtz’s last words articulate his vision of the truth of desire, its absolute insatiability and basis in an irremediable subjective lack upon which the commercial culture of Empire capitalizes. We may perhaps more easily understand the interrelationship between Kurtz’s intensely personal exploration of desire and the social critique it embodies by turning our attention to the ways in which his career also recapitulates a failed attempt to transcend a slave morality and ascend to a master morality. Kurtz’s failed attempt to make this transition provokes a crisis on the field of incipient Empire, stretching its limits just enough to expose the overlapping regimes of disciplinarity and control upon which it relies to govern effectively. The inevitable failure of this attempt, in the discovery

The Heart’s Desire 51 that true master morality is both unattainable and removed from precisely that which would make it worthwhile (i.e., social interaction), constitutes a basic component of the drama of modern subjectivity that appears repeatedly in Conrad’s work. More specifically, this movement is characterized by a character’s attempt to master desire by unrestrainedly pursuing its gratification. It concludes with the character’s discovery that desire itself can never truly be mastered and that the psychological/existential reality of subjectivity makes master morality into the same sort of myth as the utopian promise that legitimates slave morality. In Kurtz’s case this process follows an almost archetypal pattern as he moves from a position of typical slave morality to a position of seeming omnipotence as the sole arbiter of value at the Inner Station, only to discover that his ascent is finally and irremediably subject to the asymptotic logic of desire that makes a mockery of all such Faustian endeavors. Kurtz embodies the nexus of economic and libidinal slave morality: rejected by the Intended’s family because he is poor, he is subjected to the imperative of suspension and deferral of desire that underwrites slave morality and legitimates the unequal gratification of desire. His capitulation to the rigors of that morality is apparent in his actions as he willingly foregoes the immediate gratification of his desire for the Intended and follows the “proper” channels in venturing off to make his fortune and earn the right to her. Perhaps bipolitically conditioned by life as “a pauper” to identify the deferral of desire with moral conduct, Kurtz accepts the terms of the family’s disapproval of him and opts for the apparent moral high road of honoring their wishes. That is, he capitulates to the power of the Intended’s family (the combined forces of class and economics, manifest in their absolute control over the Intended’s fate with regard to Kurtz), ceding his desire to their demands and sublimating it into the realm of economic improvement. Impatient not of his inability to win the Intended for his wife, but of his “comparative poverty,” Kurtz makes the transition from the suspension of libidinal desire to the structures and rules of capital accumulation seamlessly, in part because he already inhabits (and is inhabited by) its legitimating ideology. Though we might be tempted to read Kurtz’s awareness that economics is what brings him to Africa as a cynical foundation that

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destabilizes his devotion to the moral side of his undertaking, there is no reason to assume that he makes his journey with anything but the most sincere dedication to the cause he serves. Indeed, the manager of the Central Station gives us reason to credit the full-blown naïveté with which Kurtz approaches his endeavor: “And the pestiferous absurdity of his talk . . . ‘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 ass!” (HD, 91). In a manner characteristic of slave morality and Empire’s biopolitical production of subjectivities, Kurtz internalizes rather than objects to the basic economic inequity that allows the Intended’s family to dictate his future, consequently sublimating his frustrated desire into a belief system that subordinates its economic basis to its rhetorical legitimation. The paradox thus generated is characteristic of ideology’s operation on the individual psyche, designated by Althusser as the dissonance between what a subject proclaims and what he or she does, and pithily summed up by Zˇ izˇek in the formulation “I know very well . . . but just the same.”10 In terms of slave morality, this paradox manifests itself as a fundamental precondition; the very industry, power, and activity exerted by Kurtz (features we associate with master morality) actually have their origin and basis in the work ethic of slave morality. Thus, though it might seem paradoxical that Kurtz goes to Africa out of personal economic and libidinal motives and yet becomes a luminary of the “gang of virtue” (HD, 79), the two are interdependent as commercial industry guarantees moral standing and vice versa. Kurtz’s pamphlet is the only direct evidence we have of his state of mind when he first arrives in Africa, but it amply indicates the degree to which he is interpellated by the ideology of slave morality: “[H]e soared and took me [Marlow] with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded 10. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” 156; Slavoj Zˇ izˇek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, 168. See also Zˇ izˇek, Sublime Object, 11–53, and Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre.”

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power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words” (HD, 118). Reproducing the rhetoric typically associated with religious writings, Marlow’s response to Kurtz’s pamphlet is that of faith in a divine designer and evangelical enthusiasm. These responses to the pamphlet’s rhetoric are reinforced by its content, which posits an immanent transcendence in the activity of Imperial exploitation, situating the white agents of this exploitation as apostles (of which Marlow is a “lower sort”) who bear the promise of salvation through civilization. By thus reproducing both the rhetoric and the content of religious writings (which Nietzsche saw as paradigmatically slavish) to sustain its promise of redemption and philanthropy, Kurtz’s pamphlet represents a vision of unlimited faith in the principles of slave morality as they legitimate the Imperial project. The problem with this vision of unbounded faith is that its positive elements are countered every step of the way by implications that Marlow finds “ominous” (HD, 118). First, in an odd twist on the secularization of slave morality that characterizes the rise of imperialist modernity, Kurtz depicts white imperialist administrators not simply as apostles but as gods: “in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity” (HD, 118). The slippage from “apostle” to “god” articulates the secularizing tendency of modernity, which manifests itself not through a disavowal of God but through an assertion of (certain) humans as gods, and points to a fundamental discontinuity between Kurtz’s Imperial (i.e., masterful) ideology and his religious (i.e., slavish) rhetoric. He remains blind to this disruption at the time of writing the pamphlet, however, carrying on his comparison in a single-minded conception of the Imperial project as fundamentally philanthropic: “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded” (HD, 118). Entirely subject to the rhetorical alignment of “good” with the aims of Empire (in this context, those of the Company), Kurtz buys into the slave morality that accepts the terms laid out for its activity and sets to work at maximizing the “good” defined by those terms. Gradually, however, he comes to believe that the will of the Company’s functionaries is the real power at work. Falling into the rhetorical pattern of Imperial self-legitimation, Kurtz abandons the notion

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of an impersonal “good” or “august Benevolence” guiding the Imperial project, only to place his faith in the notion that Imperial administrators like himself are akin to deities who are only nominally in service of a philanthropic enterprise that depends ultimately on their willingness to exercise their will for good. Initially part of the “gang of virtue,” Kurtz eventually comes to see that the slave morality that legitimates the Imperial project in fact masks a will to power, a drive to mastery that reproduces the ideology of slave morality only to serve its own purposes. What Kurtz fails to realize at this point (and up until his death) is that the will to power that the rhetoric of philanthropy masks is not available to individuals in any way. Instead, it always and only belongs to those corporate structures that have transcended individual control to configure and dictate the fate of the modern Imperial subject. Even the Company men, for all their power of life and death over their underlings, remain but administrators, slaves to the overwhelming corporate will to power of incipient Empire. For both them and Kurtz, the notion that the master morality derives from individual will to power is but a gross misrecognition of the relationship between their (phantasmal) individual will to power and that of the Company. While Kurtz starts out in a position of good faith according to which he really does see his power as an Imperial administrator only in the context of the enterprise it is meant to further, Marlow allows us no such period of naive grace. Even as he quotes the words with which Kurtz announces the alignment of his consciousness with the ideology of Imperial expansion, he also brings to bear the insight of his experience, drawing our attention to the tautological implications of such a logic: “[I]n the light of later information, [the peroration] strikes me now as ominous” (HD, 118). The first bit of this “later information” appears a few lines later on, as Marlow discovers “a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, [and constituting] the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’” (HD, 118). Like a book of revelation to the pamphlet’s gospel of altruism, this final note illuminates the reality

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of Imperial expansion underlying the rhetoric that advances it. The suddenness of its appearance captures in concentrated form the intimate relationship between the rhetoric of slave morality and the reality of master morality even as it returns our attention to what we know of Kurtz’s career in the Congo in order to find clues to what catalyzed this change. The shaky handwriting in which Kurtz’s postscript appears indicates the gradual sloughing off of an interpellative apparatus, which is perhaps the most important factor in his transition from a believer in the ideology and rhetoric of slave morality into a practitioner of unrestrained master morality. As he penetrates deeper into the developing heart of Empire in his quest for the ivory that drives the machinery of its expanding influence and power in this part of the world, Kurtz experiences a falling away of civilization. Marlow calls our attention to this falling away when he points out to his interlocutors the modern subject’s dependence on the society of control’s stabilizing interpellative apparatuses: “You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums” (HD, 116). Capturing modernity in the characteristic images of technological improvements (pavement), urbanization (the ubiquitous “kind” neighbors), and the rationalization of the marketplace as a result of division of labor (the butcher), Marlow clinches his characterization of the civilization Kurtz loses with the disciplinary figure of the policeman and the apparatus of the legal system. His emphasis on the policeman, placing him last in the list and aligning him with the specific punishments feared by subjects under the law in modernity’s complex regime of control, evokes (in terms strikingly prescient of Althusser) the interpellative power of the juridico-legal apparatus to determine and control subjects through the enforcement of slave morality as the ideology of deferred gratification. The pervasiveness of this ideology, as not only a cultural fact but an organizing feature of subjectivity within the symbolic order of incipient Empire, is exposed via the references to “kind neighbors” that bookend the reference to the policeman and the apparatus of law and order. In addition to the initial reference to the “kind

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neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you,” we find the policeman’s function repeated and extended in the “warning voice of a kind neighbor . . . whispering of public opinion” (HD, 116). The interpellative policeman’s hail in the street is supplemented and displaced here by the whispers of public opinion as Marlow goes beyond even Althusser’s conception of interpellation to factor in the biopolitical production of subjectivity it brings about. More than the simply disciplinary power of the policeman as a figure of the official apparatuses of law and order, the whispers of public opinion are the markers of a fundamentally reconfigured subjectivity, one that has internalized the hailing voice of ideological authority and in turn echoes it, diffusing it throughout the cultural atmosphere. In a dialectical extension and reversal of Althusser’s formulation, Marlow here captures the essence not only of ideology’s dependence on the category of the subject,11 but also subjectivity’s dependence on ideology (as a particular manifestation of the symbolic order) in Empire’s burgeoning regime of control. The importance of this interdependence of subjectivity and ideology for my reading of Kurtz’s experience of slave morality becomes clear when we remember that he is initially driven to seek his fortune in the Congo precisely because of the Intended’s family’s uncritical subjection to public opinion. In the process of attempting to convey to his audience the effect that leaving all “civilizing” influence had on Kurtz, Marlow introduces the very mechanism that drove Kurtz away in the first place. This recognition of the multifarious forces of interpellation that make of Kurtz one of the “gang of virtue” also heightens our awareness of the irony that follows when the sudden evaporation of those forces results in Kurtz’s wholesale rejection of the values they promote and his attempt to abandon the restraint of slave morality for the exhilaration of master morality. When Kurtz finds himself free of the ideological constraints that have frustrated his desire for the Intended and sees into the unrestrained gratification of desire that characterizes the proto-Imperial project, he capitulates to the “truth” of the operational master morality of the profit motive taken to its logical extreme. Abruptly resituated from a position of “comparative poverty” and frustrated 11. See Althusser, “Ideology,” 160.

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desire to one of power and means of gratification resembling that of a “supernatural being . . . with the might as of a deity,” Kurtz believes that he sees through the rhetoric of philanthropy and abstention that characterizes slave morality, recognizing it as the legitimating ideology of imperialist expansion and modern progress. Charged with generating profit for the Company at all costs and aligned for perhaps the first time in his life with the forces that make and enforce the laws of slave morality, Kurtz welcomes, in two expressions of the mechanics of ideology, the apparent selfreferentiality of the master morality at work behind the scenes. The first expression is that of the scrawled footnote at the end of his pamphlet, leading him past the simile-driven rhetoric of his eloquent peroration to an attempt to embody the power that is only approached by that rhetoric. That is, instead of appearing only “in the nature of supernatural beings” and “with the might as of a deity” (my emphases), Kurtz conceives of and acts out his accession to master morality in terms of actually becoming a supernatural being and a deity. To this end, he asks “to be sent [to the Inner Station] with the idea of showing what he could do” (HD, 89), a project that quickly devolves into “getting himself adored” by the natives in his employ (HD, 129). Emulating the ethic of domination by force that he sees all around him as the Company’s modus operandi, Kurtz abandons his dedication to the service of “good” or “an august Benevolence” and establishes himself as a god, a Nietzschean superman who transcends existing structures of authority by the simple assertion of the primacy of his own desires: “His ascendancy was extraordinary. The camps of these people surrounded the place, and the chiefs came every day to see him. They would crawl” (HD, 131). Subjecting the chiefs of the indigenous tribes and establishing his supremacy over their authority, Kurtz becomes the epitome of master morality. He appears completely self-referential, having no outside standard by which to measure his desires or their gratification and indulging himself on such a disturbing scale that Marlow neither wants to hear about it nor tell about it: “I don’t want to know anything of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz” (HD, 131–32). The second way in which Kurtz embraces masterly selfreferentiality—one that is even more significant than the power he

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exercises over the natives and that can be generated and sustained with a few simple tricks12—is his ability to convince the Russian harlequin that he is above the standards of normal judgment and conduct: “You can’t judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man” (HD, 128). The harlequin goes on to provide evidence for this conclusion by telling of Kurtz’s willingness to kill him for a small amount of ivory. His point seems to be that the very monstrosity of Kurtz’s desire and irrationality of his need for gratification elevates him above the realm of normal human standards. Once freed from the constraints of the ideology of slave morality, Kurtz ascends to a position of master morality with such enthusiasm and dedication that he becomes the grounding point of an ideological field governed by his desires, determined by his disposition, and enforced by a disciplinary regime that draws its power from his apparent supremacy over life and death. When the spiraling increase of his desires, according to the supplementary logic of desire (each gratification only reproduces desire anew), leads him to challenge the institutional apparatus that put him in place to begin with, however, Kurtz discovers the spuriousness of his mastery. As we shall see, his clash with the Company brings Kurtz to what Hardt and Negri, following Sartre, call “the moment of the boomerang,”13 the moment at which Empire’s drive to expand by subsuming that which is “outside” turns back on the subjects already within its purview in an intensive, biopolitical counterpoint to its extensive, geopolitical imperative. With its bottom line threatened, the Company brings to bear the full power of the ideological apparatus of modernity and emphatically resituates Kurtz as a slave, as a corporate subject, and as a subject of modernity (the difference here is one of degree rather than kind). The first incident that points to the difficulties Kurtz will have in breaking completely from his position as a subject of modernity (in its corporate manifestation as the allegorically named Company) comes when he sends his assistant out of the Inner Station. The manager of the Central Station recounts the episode to his uncle: “[H]e sent his 12. For examples of such tricks, see George Washington Williams, “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of the Congo.” 13. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 131.

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assistant down the river with a note to me in these terms: ‘Clear this poor devil out of the country, and don’t bother sending more of that sort. I had rather be alone than have the kind of men you can dispose of with me’” (HD, 89). The aggressive assertion of self-sufficiency in Kurtz’s missive understandably upsets the manager of the Central Station. And though the manager is inconsequential in his own right, he is significant as a representative of the Company; he is more completely subjected to the Company’s will than Kurtz ever was, never doubts the necessity of brutal methods in conducting the Company’s business, and disparages Kurtz’s early philanthropic ideals as “pestiferous absurdity.” The temptation to read this reaction as indicative of the manager’s potential for mastery demonstrates the ease with which the Company’s employees could come to identify their own personal will with that of the corporation. Though the manager can see Kurtz’s philanthropic dedication as absurd, he himself remains blindly subject to the corporate will of the Company. His derision and articulation of the will to power are but echoes of the corporate culture to which he is so deeply subjected that he mistakes its values for his own. Ultimately, he and Kurtz represent two competing versions of slave morality: Kurtz’s devotion to philanthropy manifests traditional humanist slave morality, while the manager’s is an instance of emergent corporate slave morality. Despite his affront to the Company’s hierarchical organization and governance, Kurtz remains in his position as manager of the Inner Station because he continues to produce ivory for the Company. When the manager’s uncle asks him if he has heard anything from Kurtz since his offensive note, the manager replies, “‘Ivory . . . lots of it—prime sort—lots—most annoying, from him.’ ‘And with that?’ questioned [the uncle]. ‘Invoice,’ was the reply fired out, so to speak” (HD, 90). Though he has broken with Company policy in sending back his assistant and rejecting the possibility of a replacement, Kurtz remains undisturbed by the Company not only because he produces profit, but also because he continues to observe Company policy on the important side of the business, including invoices with his shipments so that people like the accountant at the Outer Station can balance the books. His adherence to the rigorous bookkeeping methods of the Company counterbalances his rejection

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of an assistant who could conceivably monitor his behavior and guarantee the integrity of his activity. To this point his rebellious behavior does not provoke the Company’s disciplinary measures because he still remains within the most important (i.e., the economic) part of its regime of control. This is only the case, however, until Kurtz begins to exhibit stronger signs of breaking with the Company and establishing his independence at the Inner Station. Recounting the remainder of the conversation he overheard between the manager and his uncle, Marlow tells us that nearly a year previously Kurtz had come most of the way out from the Inner Station with a load of ivory: “Kurtz had apparently intended to return himself, the station being by that time bare of goods and stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly decided to go back” (HD, 90). Sending the load of ivory on without him, Kurtz retreats back to the Inner Station without even taking the time to obtain fresh provisions and supplies. His refusal to come all the way out of the jungle is a rejection of the corporate structure he is supposed to serve; his rejection of Companysanctioned supplies is an overt declaration of independence, an effort to break from the Company’s control. Further, by refusing to restock his provisions from the Company’s stores, Kurtz maximizes the profits of his station at the expense of the Company—he all but declares himself an independent supplier of ivory to the Company rather than its agent. That this gesture is followed by a prolonged period of silence during which it is unclear whether the ivory continues to make its way downriver only reinforces the sense that Kurtz is attempting to seal his newfound subjective freedom with an escape from the Company’s regime of control. Kurtz’s implicit declaration of independence provokes a state of crisis that seems out of proportion to the real threat he poses, but that is in fact perfectly consistent with Empire’s operational mode of “omni-crisis,” a state of perpetual crisis management that facilitates both disciplinary and “humanitarian” intervention the world over. In straightforwardly realistic terms, Kurtz’s action cannot be seen as a real threat to the Company because the Company has a monopoly in the region—however much ivory Kurtz collects, it is still a buyer’s market. However, because of Kurtz’s unique combination of charisma, productivity, and membership in the “gang of

The Heart’s Desire 61 virtue,” his rebellion is perceived and reacted to as an immediate threat to the Company’s exploitative system. As Hardt and Negri say, “Every insurrectional event that erupts within the order of the imperial system provokes a shock to the system in its entirety.”14 The “insurrectional event” of Kurtz’s rebellion appears to threaten the Company’s totalitarian administration of the Congo and, hence, its ability to maximize profits. Thus it not only upsets the manager of the Central Station and his nephew and threatens to upset the chief accountant’s meticulously kept records, but also affects the Company’s higher-ups to the extent that they hire Marlow and send him from Europe to retrieve Kurtz and contain the damage he has done to their corporate operations. What is perhaps more fascinating than any other aspect of Kurtz’s “insurrection” and the Company’s response to it is its reproductive dimension. As I have noted above, Michael H. Levenson has correctly suggested that what Kurtz encounters upon his arrival in the Congo is the elemental reduction of European society. What Levenson does not go on to say is that Kurtz’s “insurrection” is so unsettling because it presents another turn of the screw, a further reduction of the Imperial system to its most basic disciplinary and exploitative dimensions without even the mitigating effects of a recognizable administrative apparatus. Faced with the elemental reduction of the society whose rules he has respected for most of his life, Kurtz responds to Empire’s base reality by further reducing it to its fundamental elements. His rebellion against the administrative apparatus that allows Empire to maintain a semblance of “civilized” conduct presents the Company’s operatives with a strippeddown version of their own activity. In psychosocial terms, his independence functions like the return of the repressed, provoking a response out of all proportion to the actual threat it presents. In short, the Company does not respond so much to Kurtz’s threat to its bottom line (which can quite easily be overcome; as the recent trend toward “outsourcing” in major corporations indicates, the use of free agents can in fact enhance corporate profit margins) as to the image of its own activity it finds in his “unsound methods.” In an interesting extension of this insight, the Company reinforces 14. Ibid., 201, 60.

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its reliance on the more sophisticated technologies of control with the more direct technologies of discipline. To effect the recontainment of Kurtz necessary to its totalitarian operation, the Company introduces the disciplinary measure of Marlow’s recovery-andcontainment mission, all the while taking care to avoid the appearance of simply using force to assert its power. To this end, it reintroduces moral valuation as a determining criterion for acceptable business practice, redefining Kurtz’s hitherto highly profitable trading activity as the “unsound methods” that provide the grounds for his suppression. Kurtz has seen into the workings of the Company’s operations enough to recognize the dynamic behind this undertaking, and proclaims loudly when Marlow arrives to take him away: “Save me!—save the ivory, you mean. Don’t tell me. Save me!” (HD, 137). Demonstrating how thoroughly he understands the workings of Empire’s corporate ideology, Kurtz exposes the disparity between the Company’s overt humanitarian aim and its covert economic concern. What is more, Kurtz’s rather cranky declaration is borne out by the manager’s callous commentary in which he disposes of the question of Kurtz’s health as quickly as possible, neglecting even “to be consistently sorrowful” before reiterating Kurtz’s complaint in the dispassionate voice of business: “[T]here is a remarkable quantity of ivory—mostly fossil. We must save it, at all events” (HD, 137). The manager’s echo of Kurtz’s accusation generates an ironic field around this episode by acknowledging the truth of Kurtz’s indictment. The irony surrounding this scene of recontainment and recovery of property is twofold, however, as the Company is also right about Kurtz’s plans to break from the corporate structure: “This lot of ivory now is really mine. The Company did not pay for it. I collected it myself at a very great personal risk. I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs though. . . . I want no more than justice” (HD, 156). Manipulating the process of shipping and invoicing by which the Company “pays” for the ivory its agents send, Kurtz has tried to set aside a cache of wealth for himself—he has discovered the temptations of embezzlement in an ironically slavish imitation of the very system he is trying to escape (and for which he earlier threatened to kill the harlequin), just as Nostromo does when he decides to “grow rich slowly” on stolen silver (N, 544). Compounding

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the revelation of his slavishness by declaring that he wants “no more than justice,” Kurtz invokes the ideological ideal that underwrites the law’s real task of protecting the property rights of its legitimate, recognized subjects (as opposed to self-styled outlaws like Kurtz). His appeal to justice takes on an even more ironic tone when we recall that the institution of the law, the material representative of the ideal of justice, in the Congo is the same Company that exercises its disciplinary power over him even as he makes his appeal. The irony of Kurtz’s plea to Marlow for help in keeping “his” ivory, however, is undercut by the pathos of the realization to which it leads us: that for all his striving to establish himself as a god among men, Kurtz remains an Imperial subject on the most fundamental level, adhering in the final analysis to the ideology of property accumulation and retention through the agencies of commerce and the law. If we approach Kurtz’s final moments from the perspective of this awareness, we can see how Conrad articulates not only a vision of the truth of subjectivity in Kurtz’s final words, but also a vision of the truth of Empire as an undifferentiated global network, the limits of which appear coextensive with the limits of subjectivity. In this regard, Kurtz’s vision is both a vision of the end of desire and a vision of the inescapable recontainments of Imperial modernity’s regime of control. Whereas Marlow’s commentary on the effects of Kurtz’s solitude evokes and extends the Althusserian premise that ideology is dependent on the category of the subject by establishing that the category of the subject is also dependent on ideology, Kurtz’s “supreme moment of complete knowledge” puts the final seal on this interrelationship with the horrifying recognition that the end of ideology, the escape from the constraints of Empire that Kurtz sought in the jungle, is also the end of subjectivity. The “whispered cry” of his vision is the closest he can come to articulating the devastating impact of this realization as he sees past ideology and past subjectivity. In the depth of this vision, Kurtz finds the void around which both ideology and subjectivity are structured and which both conceal,15 and ultimately bears witness to the operational truth that master morality is a feature available only to the corporate entities that increasingly govern the life of the modern Imperial subject. 15. See Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” 201; and Zˇ izˇek, Sublime Object, 126.

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Kurtz embodies slave morality from the time in the novel’s prehistory at which he sublimates his frustrated desire for the Intended and elides the economic imperative behind that frustration. This intimate experience of modernity’s rationalist hegemony leads him to subscribe to the secular replacement for religious sentiment, the moral code of slave morality that sustains the philanthropic facade of imperialist legitimation. In the final stage of his career, Kurtz discovers that each of these elements of his experience (rationalization and secularization) is but a component of the totalizing reach of capitalism. Witness to the Company’s assertion of the corporate will to gratify its desire, Kurtz attempts to emulate that activity (i.e., to accede to a position of mastery) only to discover that such a will to power is available only to the corporation. His harsh recontainment by the Company forces him to recognize once and for all that he is a slave, a mere means to an end rather than an end in himself (as he believed in his spurious mastery), whose liabilities at last outweigh the profit he generates. Kurtz dies in the realization that ideology need not be true to be necessary and that necessity itself embodies a kind of truth. As Levenson tells us, Conrad concretely depicted what Max Weber only hypothesized (a “theory of social organization [that] contains implications for a theory of modern character”), tracing the evolution of Empire by creating a microcosm of its early stages and then subjecting Kurtz and Marlow to its pressures. In this regard Heart of Darkness reveals Conrad to be much more than simply “our most searching critic of bureaucracy,”16 but in fact our most astute diagnostician of the clash between the psychic and the social that takes place on the field of Imperial subjectivity. Kurtz’s tale (mediated as it is by Marlow’s narrating consciousness) is perhaps the consummate account of the predicament of the Imperial subject. The particular confluence of forces governing the subjects in Heart of Darkness (rationalization, secularization, and capitalism) is definitively modern, and its impact on subjectivity is registered in Kurtz’s losing battle with the vagaries of desire as it is excited, manipulated, exploited, and ultimately reconfigured to conform to the exigencies of a new reality, a place on the map so darkened now that it is impossible to read what might have gone before or instead. 16. Levenson, “Value of Facts,” 399, 396, 397.

2

 Dereliction of Duty

Just as Heart of Darkness extends the themes and concerns of Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and “An Outpost of Progress,” Lord Jim forcefully develops and brings added complexity to the problematics initially presented in The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” Both Lord Jim and The Nigger of the “Narcissus” present the tension between individual self-interest and the (sometimes exorbitant) demands of the prevailing social organization. Moreover, both works illustrate the erosion of that social organization from within, registering the dawning awareness that the organization exists only by virtue of the willing participation of the subjects whom it organizes; just as the possibility that Wait is malingering precipitates a crisis among the crew on the Narcissus, so Jim’s ex post facto display of honor in standing trial for his transgression precipitates a crisis among the marine community. By capturing the reciprocal (and at times paradoxical) dynamic by which a group of people can constitute an organization that then oppresses them, both The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Lord Jim function as parables of modernity. In essence, as I will show more clearly in my discussion of Lord Jim, they capture the transition from Renaissance humanism’s conception of the immanent power of the multitude to modern sovereignty’s recontainment of that power through the transcendentalization of institutional structures. The signal difference between the two novels,

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and one of the reasons why I write at length about Lord Jim and not about The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” is that, as Chris Bongie and others have pointed out, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” concludes with a nostalgic affirmation of the “posthumous creation” of an authentic community while Lord Jim concludes with a radical uncertainty about any such possibility.1 This difference suggests that though Conrad was becoming aware of the impossibility of any such authentic alternative (perhaps even beginning to recognize it as a posthumous creation) and of the emergence of a qualitatively different world order when he wrote The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” he was not yet able or ready to give voice in that book to the radical uncertainty and contingency that characterize his tone in Lord Jim. In this regard, Lord Jim continues Heart of Darkness’s focus2 on the fate of an individual subject faced with the pressures of Empire’s emergent world order, but provides a fuller context in which to consider Jim’s fate as symptomatic of Imperial subjectivity by beginning its account earlier in the process of biopolitical production and surrounding Jim with a more specifically international cast. In Heart of Darkness the international aspect of modernity is figured by the English Marlow’s employment by a Belgian company to retrieve an agent who is a product of “all Europe” from his position of dominance over a Russian sycophant and African subjects. By contrast, in Lord Jim Conrad breaks the Eurocentric bonds of Heart of Darkness to overwhelm the setting with a more diffuse international perspective, particularly in the Patna episode. “Owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by a sort of renegade New South Wales German,” the Patna has the Englishman Jim for its mate, two Malays for its helmsmen, and eight hundred Muslim pilgrims of various nationalities for its “human cargo” (LJ, 14, 16). Further, the Patna is damaged when it runs over a Norwegian derelict, after which it is salvaged by a French gunboat and towed to the British-administered port of Aden. Finally, when the trial is over, Jim finds himself (thanks to the intervention of the German Stein) meting out justice in a Dutch colonial region that is subject to civil 1. Bongie, Exotic Memories, 7. 2. Though Heart of Darkness appeared in book form only after Lord Jim had been published, it was serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine a year before Lord Jim saw the light of day.

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strife as various tribes (some of which are indigenous, some of which are immigrants) of Bugis, Dyaks, Muslims, and Arabs strive to dominate the region’s trade. Despite this expansion of context, Conrad is nonetheless also able to sustain his focus on the individual’s experience of these external forces, developing his meditations on social convention, the situation and formation of the subject in the ideological order, and the consequences of responding to those forces in the manner that they simultaneously prompt and prohibit. Moreover, he actually sharpens his focus on the intimate bond between the psychic and the social so that we can trace Lord Jim’s critique of Empire by examining Jim’s subjective experience of the novel’s dominant ideological system, complete with its limits and points of failure. This dual movement of broadening scope and narrowing focus makes Lord Jim perhaps Conrad’s most explicit investigation of the gap between an ideological system’s proclaimed values and its true motivating and informing principles. Shadowing this inquiry is Conrad’s exploration of the ways in which the emergent system of global capitalism appropriates older ideologemes and social organizations, retaining and exploiting the “value-aura” emanated by their formal persistence even as it replaces their content with its own worldview. This process constitutes such an effective ideological sleight of hand that even so astute a cultural critic as Conrad could find himself perplexed by it—wanting desperately to affirm the values of a residual cultural system over against the “new barbarism” of emergent Empire,3 and yet unable finally to determine where one system leaves off and the other begins. To solve this problem, Conrad concentrates on the limited terrain of a particular professional code, even going so far as to focus on a single signifier within that code: duty. Any attempt to account for the ideological order of Lord Jim is hampered by the fact that that order is always already compromised; the narrative is prompted by, and takes place in the wake of, the Patna crew’s fracturing of the ideological system that operates as the law of the marine community. Further, though that system continues to function long after the momentary threat posed to it by the Patna incident (as indicated 3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 32.

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by the French lieutenant’s uncompromising attitude [LJ, 147]), it never fully recovers its integrity. That said, the following is an attempt to reconstruct the main elements of that ideological system, suggesting how the fragments remaining after the Patna incident fit together to create a specific (i.e., ideological) vision of reality while acknowledging the fault lines along which it has already begun to fracture. The social organization of Lord Jim is that of the marine community, “an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct” (LJ, 50). Fredric Jameson writes that “the body of men thus held together in the ideological cohesion of class values which cannot without peril be called into question is not merely the confraternity of the sea; it is the ruling class of the British Empire, the heroic bureaucracy of imperial capitalism which takes that lesser, but sometimes even more heroic, bureaucracy of the officers of the merchant fleet as a figure for itself.”4 Jameson’s analysis is compelling but stands in need of elaboration and extension. Far from being simply an extension of the “ruling class” of any one nation’s imperialist hierarchy, this community represents the vanguard of the competing forces of Empire’s supersession of nineteenth-century imperialism. It insinuates the ideology of rationalization and secularization into relatively undeveloped regions via a progressive economic dominance that owes loyalty to no individual nation, but only to the postnational capitalist value of the bottom line. This breadth of scope, taken with the thematic significance of introducing the pilgrims as “human cargo,” indicates that Conrad is concerned with Empire as an incipient global phenomenon that not only threatens but has already begun to supersede the pieties of nineteenth-century imperialist practice. The ideological field that governs this community is that of the mariners’ code, defined by Raymond Williams as “a set of laws about sailing [that are] not only technical but in their essence moral—definitions of responsibility and of duty which are at once specific practical rules and general social laws.” By way of a series of acts of 4. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 265.

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Parliament and amendments to those acts from 1850 through 1894, Michael Valdez Moses tells us, the mariners’ code transformed what has been romanticized as an unspoken chivalric and aristocratic ethic into a rigid notion of right conduct based upon and derived from commercial considerations. Though overseen by a “large semigovernmental agency, known as the Board of Trade,” the merchant marine was regulated by statutes that were also heavily influenced and shaped by groups like the “Mercantile Marine Service Association of Liverpool, a private business association of shipbuilders and owners that helped to defray the cost of training the officers of the Merchant Marine.”5 As Williams and Moses indicate, the codification of this regime of control is organized around the totalizing force of the system’s point de capiton (and, according to Zdzis`aw Najder, Conrad’s obsession), duty.6 The contexts in which duty appears as a definitive ideological element point to its central importance in the operation of the law in Lord Jim. Duty permeates all stages of the narrative and crops up whenever questions of ethical importance come to the fore: it appears in Jim’s formulation of his romantic fantasies (LJ, 6), the narrator’s censure of those seamen who opt for easy service (13), the narrator’s validation of Harbormaster Elliot’s integrity immediately before he berates the captain of the Patna (39), the account of Brierly’s career and death (57–62), Jim’s performance of his duty under normal circumstances (89), the judgment handed down by the tribunal (160), Jim’s fidelity to the terms of his agreement with Stein (285, 287), and Gentleman Brown’s repudiation of the value system to which Jim adheres in Patusan (382), not to mention its implicit invocation in Marlow’s notion of “fidelity to a certain standard of conduct” (50) and Brierly’s conception of “just the name for that kind of decency” (68) which Jim and the crew of the Patna have violated. Just as the merchant marine community is appropriated by the emergent ideology of Empire, so the nineteenth-century ideologeme of duty is appropriated and reconfigured to shed its imperialist connotations of king and country in favor of postnational Imperial capitalism. 5. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, 141; Michael Valdez Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, 88, 87. 6. Zdzis`aw Najder, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity, 38.

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Appearing at the point of confluence of the psychic and the social, duty not only grounds the ideological field of the law of the mariners’ code, but also configures the subjectivities of those who submit to it as a professional standard of conduct sanctioned and facilitated by the machinery of modernity. Through a process of testing, experience, and indoctrination by tales of “those who adventured their persons and their lives risk[ing] all they had for a slender reward” as imbibed by the likes of Jim through his “course of light holiday literature” (LJ, 227, 5), the sophisticated biopolitical mechanisms of Empire configure and orient individuals as sailorsubjects. They make of them workers whose identity is bound up with their professional status, sealing the deal with the written record of completed subjectivation, the “bit of ass’s skin” that is the all-important certificate of competence (LJ, 161). This process configures the subjectivity of these individuals such that they take “fidelity to a certain standard of conduct” to be the absolute and rigid law of their chosen profession, a profession which, if they do it properly, is coextensive with their subjectivity. As Marlow tells us, it is the duty of each ship’s captain to perpetuate this regime of control by driving the secret of the craft of the sea (i.e., complete dedication to duty) “afresh every day into young heads till it becomes the component part of every waking thought—till it is present in every dream of their young sleep” (LJ, 44). We can hardly ask for a clearer expression of the importance of the marine community’s biopolitical configuration of would-be sailors’ consciousnesses. Picking up where fathers leave off, ships’ captains assume a surrogate paternity over their young charges, reinforcing and expanding the jurisdiction of the paternal function so that its psychic and social manifestations become indistinguishable features of the individual subject’s consciousness. As with all ideological constructions, the content of duty is imaginary; it arbitrarily constructs an appearance of immutable and incontrovertible meaning. Captain Brierly, the most prominent of the three magistrates presiding over Jim’s trial, alerts us to this aspect of duty in his declaration to Marlow that what is at stake in the trial is “just the name for that kind of decency.” Brierly’s emphasis on the “name” rather than the “decency” itself indicates a fundamental shift in his consciousness; duty no longer signifies to him some self-

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evident and immanent content, but participates in the chain of signification. Rather than naming duty outright, Brierly deflects the moment of signification, deferring his burgeoning awareness that the signifier is no longer sufficient to its imaginary significance. This act of deflection brings us closer to the hidden ideological content of duty, as the “decency” to which Brierly refers is not only the publicschool ideal but also a specifically professional attribute: “We aren’t an organized body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency” (LJ, 68). As Ian Watt says, to adhere to this code is to be “a member of the social, vocational, and, in some unexamined sense, moral, elite; to belong it is necessary to be a gentleman—both Brierly and the second engineer agree that Jim is that; and it is also necessary to work, but in a managerial capacity, or, to put it somewhat more concretely, to be a member in good standing of the group which comprises the members of the professions.”7 This characterization of duty as professional decency points toward its concealed ideological agenda, as Brierly’s ambiguity provides the key to reading through the mystifying rhetoric of courageous self-sacrifice that surrounds duty to discover its objective content. Seemingly driven to frustration by Jim’s (and perhaps even Marlow’s) inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the truth behind duty’s fiction, Brierly twice gives voice to its open secret. The first instance occurs when he states, “Frankly, I don’t care a snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of Asia, but a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo of old rags in bales” (LJ, 68). The second comes during his pronouncement of the verdict upon the crew of the Patna. Immediately after declaring that the crew had behaved “in utter disregard of their plain duty,” Brierly states that the particular features of that negligence are constituted by “abandoning in the moment of danger the lives and property confided to their charge” (LJ, 160). Whereas the ethical horror of Jim’s action is repeatedly stated (both in the novel and the criticism on the novel) to be the abandonment of eight hundred humans to drown, Brierly’s two pronouncements on the issue declare a rather different concern. He formulates the outrage equally in terms of a 7. Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 312.

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failure of humane conduct and in terms of a broken contract to deliver goods. In both his comments, Brierly makes direct equivalences between the pilgrims and “property,” thus revealing that the real nature of Jim’s crime is not in “its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind” (LJ, 157), as Marlow would have us believe, but in his blatantly irresponsible failure to deliver his shipment of “human cargo.” Marlow’s failure to recognize the truly troubling implications of these equivalences points to the pervasiveness of the capitalist processes that not only generate but also naturalize the concept of “human cargo” as anything but a grotesque reification. It also, of course, points to the prescience of Conrad’s vision, as the history of the Middle Passage, transportation of Chinese wives to North America, and, more recently, human smuggling around the world via routes and methods normally reserved for inanimate cargo all attest. By paying close attention to these moments in the speech of Lord Jim’s primary ideologue, we can see past the ostensibly immanent content of duty (and the ideological field it grounds), detaching it from its privileged position as point de capiton and exploring the objective truth obscured by its imaginary construction. The ideological order exposed by this operation is that of a world where subjects are configured and oriented according to the myth of an organic community in which individuals accept the imperative to serve the greater good. The reality masked and facilitated by that myth is that they in fact serve the interests of those who own the ships and the cargo, generating profit through their willingness to suspend their desire and to accept the possibility of death in the performance of their duty. In the final analysis, these subjects are no better off than the “human cargo” on board the Patna, resting firm in their faith in the system to which they are subject while that system treats them only as means to an end, violating the first principle of Enlightenment ethics in favor of the first principle of capitalist economics. These concerns reach their most elemental form in Jim’s trial. Much more than just an instance of the enforcement of the disinterested law of the marine community, Jim’s trial in fact reveals the basis of that law (and the idealized cultural values it purports to defend) as a very specific ideological construction grounded in the ex-

Dereliction of Duty 73 igencies of emergent Empire. Jim is a radically and publicly fractured subject after the Patna incident, but his dutiful comportment brings enough weight to his eccentric position on this ideological field to shift its axis and expose its inner workings. Tony E. Jackson’s reading of Jim as the objet a of the symbolic order of the mariners’ code is suggestive in this context, though the suggestion that any person or thing can actually function as the objet a directly contravenes Lacan’s concept.8 Rather, as I will show, we must read Jim as a witness, as a marker of the objet a that the system cannot bear to consider and so expels. Jim’s insistence on standing trial translates onto a social level the revelation he experiences in his leap from the Patna—the threat of extinction harbored by the social organization as the traumatic kernel that lends duty its power to signify. (I will elaborate upon this shortly.) Thus, though the trial is cast as a prosecution of Jim, it is really an instance in which Jim bears witness to the flaw in a system that would hold him accountable for his dereliction of duty while letting the root causes of that moment of extremity go unexamined. As Marlow tells us, “Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair” (LJ, 56). That is, the trial purports to discipline Jim for failing duty. As it does so, though, Jim bears witness to the exorbitant demands of the official conception of duty by affirming his rejection of those demands. At the same time, he presents an aspect that is consistent with the values that inform and organize it. In this guise, Jim stands before the court as the embodiment neither of an unredeemed shirker (even the crew on the lifeboat vilifies him only as a “half-hearted shirker” [LJ, 121]) nor of an ideally interpellated seaman-subject, but of the interpellative system’s point of failure, the outsider from inside whose similarity unsettlingly persists in the face of his supposedly irreducible difference. He remains “one of us” as the most obviously marked subject of the ideological system that (over)determines each and every Imperial subject, testifying to the irrationality and violence of that marking by forcing the system to address his inadequacy to, and the excess of, its demands. Perhaps the best evidence of the effectiveness of Jim’s challenge 8. See Jackson, Subject of Modernism, 81–85.

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comes from Brierly, whose effort to articulate the final exigency of duty as it is contained and structured by the imaginary content of the ideological field fails in the face of its real: “A man may go pretty near through his whole sea-life without any call to show a stiff upper lip. But when the call comes . . . Aha! . . . If I . . .” (LJ, 68). Speech fails Brierly just when he attempts to articulate the fundamental tenet of the mariners’ code, the one aspect of the ideological order it represents that should be a feature of consciousness for any self-respecting seaman. In the face of this failure Brierly changes his approach, exposing the economic imperative that is really at work: “I’ll give you two hundred rupees now, Marlow, and you just talk to that chap” (LJ, 68). In his haste to avoid speaking the final imperative of duty in its official construction, Brierly unwittingly betrays the glossed-over practicalities of sustaining duty’s power. Unable to fathom Jim’s motives in standing trial (since all is lost with the transgression of duty), Brierly repeats the dynamic by which shipping companies trade in human lives under the cover of an idealized professional ethic of self-renunciation. Brierly’s subsequent suicide, taken with the fact that he and Jim have similar origins (Brierly’s people know Jim’s people and Brierly has even met Jim’s father [LJ, 68]), demonstrates just how much more than Jim he is subject to the ideology of the mariners’ code and thus how much more devastating its compromise is for him. Significantly, Brierly’s suicide is also a dereliction of duty, an act of such enormous bad faith (despite the precautions he takes for the ship’s, the mate’s, and even his dog’s well-being) that we cannot but read it as a more extreme version of Jim’s response to the illuminating shift in the orientation of the ideological system. In this regard I follow Jameson, who argues that Brierly’s suicide “becomes a social gesture and a class abdication rather than that existential discovery of nothingness that it has so often been interpreted to be.”9 Whereas Jim can stand to look beyond the veil of the code of professional conduct and defy both its traumatic kernel and its degraded motivation, Brierly simply cannot bear the brush with the system’s real, perceiving in its apparition an irreparable breach with which he cannot live. The system that Brierly represents, however, has no such diffi9. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 264.

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culty—it responds to Jim’s challenge neither by collapsing in the face of its own compromised structure, nor by regressing into pure disciplinarity (e.g., by simply having Jim flogged). Rather, it insists upon restoring its own integrity by expelling him from the field of consideration. In this regard, the court’s decision marks a stage in the historical transition from regimes of discipline to regimes of control, which Hardt and Negri say is so integral to Empire. Canceling Jim’s certificate, the court effectively sutures the gap to which Jim bears witness by writing over his subject position, transforming it from a positive to a negative marker in the ideological field. His certificate is not simply destroyed, but is kept under erasure in the archives of maritime law. With this elision Jim’s transformation from full participant to irremediable other is complete even as the regime of control that governs him tightens its grip on his psyche. Henceforth he stands in relation to the ideological order of the brotherhood of the sea as a negative term, the denial of the very core value that informs the system of that confraternity. Through this process of negative definition Jim is quite literally made an outlaw, an expelled, canceled, barred subject whose status as an erstwhile participant now under censure/erasure reinforces the boundary of the field from which he is excluded. Expelled from the brotherhood of the sea and yet in thrall to its regime of control, Jim becomes a deterritorialized subject, unable to go home, unable to stay put, and without a stable point of reference by which to orient himself. As I have suggested, Jim’s expulsion from the official order of the merchant marine does not mark the end of that system in the novel, however. Jim is not merely an operative in the system, but also a product of it; his subjectivity is inextricably tied to its ideology and he is doomed to repeat his experience even when he establishes a counterorder in Patusan. This persistence manifests itself in ways that play on Jim’s three ties to the world of modernity from which he has fled as he tries to reterritorialize himself by territorializing Patusan. The first of these is that though Jim obviously works hard to instill a notion of fairness to the dealings taking place in Patusan, he does nothing to displace the economic structure that gives rise to the strife and inequity he finds upon his arrival there. The conflict between the Rajah, Sherif Ali, and Doramin is only secondarily about religion and ethnicity; it is first and foremost about trade and

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who will secure the right to profit most from it (in terms of both wealth and power). The extent to which this borders upon theft in the Rajah’s and Sherif Ali’s practices is clear, but Marlow also makes a point of linking their cutthroat tactics to the underlying principles of ostensibly civilized trading practice, telling his listeners that a good many of the rogues he has known in his time are “twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your table without any real necessity—from habit, from cowardice, from goodnature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons” (LJ, 41). The advent of peace at Jim’s hands is thus due not to the eradication of a bloodthirsty competition for trade, but to its more rigorous organization according to the rules of commerce that govern the world from which Jim has been expelled. These rules subordinate ethnic and national distinctions to the abstractions and productions of value in capitalism, ostensibly reducing difference in the name of peaceful commerce while in fact simply sublimating the aggressivity of ethnic conflict into the impersonal totalitarianism of rationalization as reification, and naturalizing the absurd (making workers’ forfeiture of their lives a standard contract clause and transporting human passengers as “cargo” for the purposes of reducing overhead and prices) as the logical outcome of modernity’s iron law. The second tie between Jim and the self-replicating machinery of modernity as it governs his activity in Patusan is bound up with the very means by which he gets to Patusan. Jim does not end up in Patusan by chance, but is sent there by Stein, whose offer of help, however much it is motivated by his affinity for Jim, is also prompted by the fact that “commercially the [current] arrangement was not a success, at any rate for the firm, and now the woman had died, Stein was disposed to try another agent there” (LJ, 220). Moreover, it would seem that Stein’s is a wise business decision, as Jim is soon able to look “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” (LJ, 247). The peace Jim brings (through war, as Linda Dryden notes)10 is that of the pax imperium, an artificial placidity 10. Linda Dryden, Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance, 181.

Dereliction of Duty 77 sustained by the economic and ideological supremacy of a man whose relation to the emergent world of Empire is not that of governor, warlord, or king, but “trading-clerk” (LJ, 236). The last of the three ties between Jim, the new social order he has configured, and the old social order that configured him is the Eurasian woman Jewel’s situation of Jim in a lineage of white men who come to Patusan apparently to stay and yet inevitably return to the order from which they issue: “Other men had sworn the same thing [i.e., that they would stay in Patusan].” It was like a meditative comment on some thoughts full of sadness, of awe. And she added, still lower if possible, “My father did.” She paused the time to draw an inaudible breath. “Her father too.” . . . . . . “You all remember something! You all go back to it. What is it? You tell me! What is this thing? Is it alive?—is it dead? I hate it. It is cruel. Has it got a face and a voice—this calamity? Will he see it—will he hear it? In his sleep perhaps when he cannot see me—and then arise and go. Ah! I shall never forgive him. My mother had forgiven—but I, never! Will it be a sign—a call?” (LJ, 314–15)

Drawing on her personal experience of the difficulty of breaking completely from the order of modernity, Jewel desperately questions Marlow as to why he thinks Jim will stay in Patusan when others like him did not. At first reassuring her on the grounds that Jim is different from all his predecessors, Marlow eventually succumbs to Jewel’s badgering and admits that the very thing that might keep Jim in Patusan is his irrevocable link to the social order of his past: “‘You want to know?’ I asked in a fury. ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘Because he is not good enough’” (LJ, 318). Jim himself has already told Jewel as much, acknowledging his unbreakable tie to the world outside Patusan and belying the image of unassailable benevolence that defines his characterization as “Tuan Jim.” That this connection is negative rather than positive does little to comfort Jewel since she recognizes that the order to which Jim owes his first allegiance is not simply an external system of laws and customs, but also an internal feature, a constitutive element of Jim’s psychic makeup that can never completely vanish. The action of Lord Jim takes place nearly on the other side of the world from that of Heart of Darkness, but the basic process of metonymization by which Conrad introduces the novel’s central themes

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persists. Like the Company in the Congo, the community of the merchant marine stands in for the larger cultural field of modernity, reproducing its ideology in the mariners’ code by which the conduct of individuals is measured, relying on privileged signifiers to crystallize the interpellative force of that ideology, and administering the law to guarantee the protection of its underlying interests. The extent to which Conrad’s vision of modernity, even as distilled into a single professional organization, captures the overdetermination between the apparatuses of ideology and the subject’s interpellated consciousness becomes clear when Jim’s effort to escape the system/regime that rejects him only results in his replication of that system in Patusan. The merchant marine community, complete with ideological and repressive apparatuses, thus forms the backbone of the social organization of Lord Jim, setting the stage for a fuller exploration of the psychic consequences of subjectivity in such an order. Expanding upon his treatment of subjectivation in Heart of Darkness, Conrad in Lord Jim pursues a much more detailed narrative of Jim’s family romance, one that places equal emphasis on both the “family” and the “romance” aspects of this term. With regard to the family component, I should say more accurately that Conrad presents us with a detailed treatment of Jim’s family romances, for in addition to providing us with information regarding Jim’s childhood experiences and the influence of his family—especially his father—Lord Jim also shows how Jim’s early intensive exposure to Empire’s biopolitical production of subjectivity plays itself out through his involvement with a succession of surrogate father figures (Brierly, Marlow, Stein) and with his surrogate family in Patusan. In all these episodes, the influence of Jim’s father—as both paterfamilias and parson—is paramount. Though Jim has two parents and several siblings, only his father has a discernible and lasting affect on his ethical, psychological, and ideological development. This simultaneously filial and religious paternal influence leads to the romance component of Lord Jim’s family romances as Jim responds to his father’s influence by manufacturing compensatory fantasies. These fantasies draw on the raw material of adventure romance to configure an escapist version of the primary narcissism that characterizes psychic life prior to its cleavage by the paternal prohibition.

Dereliction of Duty 79 Their constitutive relationship to Jim’s family romances, along with the detail Conrad provides about those family romances, entails a more sustained treatment of the subject in Lord Jim, a treatment that shows Conrad’s burgeoning sensitivity to how Imperial biopolitical production operates not only through the mechanisms of intimate and familial relations but also through the ideological apparatus of popular literature. The extent to which Jim is governed by the paternal function, and the transition to the symbolic it enforces, appears most clearly in the circumstances under which Jim reveals his desire to go to sea: “[A]fter a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself” (LJ, 5). Contained in this primal scene are two related elements that shed light on Jim’s family romance as the key to the ideological situation of his subjectivity. The first significant element is the raw material with which Jim constructs his own personal adventures as compensatory fantasies. The “light holiday literature” Jim reads feeds directly into his conception of himself as a budding romantic hero. Linda Dryden and Andrea White have both suggestively explored the influence of imperial romance in Lord Jim.11 Dryden in particular argues that Conrad was not only influenced by but also toyed with the conventions of imperial romance. My reading of this element of Lord Jim builds on Dryden’s analysis to argue that its significance comes from the libidinal work it does as it sublimates the overtly sexual aspects of the pleasure principle into the camaraderie of male community from which women are absent (except when they provide occasion for male heroics—for the benefit of this community). In this way, imperial romance creates an ideological framework in which libidinal gratification is displaced by the imaginary satisfactions of machismo achieved through self-denial and endurance. The second element of this primal scene that merits comment is its use of the concept of “vocation.” This term applies primarily to the kind of calling Jim’s father would have experienced before entering the clergy. It also, if we credit Weber’s and Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis, applies to the installation of the profit motive and unlimited accumulation of wealth as religious callings that 11. Ibid.; White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition.

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lend themselves particularly well to the transition from the Protestant ethic to its secular manifestation as the spirit of capitalism. In this context, Jim’s father’s role as representative of divine authority on earth brings added authority to his paternal injunctions. Conrad gives these injunctions specifically ideological import, commenting not on Jim’s father’s piety or his sanctity, but on his role as a protector of vested interests: “Jim’s father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions” (LJ, 5). Part of the machinery of biopolitical production that perpetuates the Imperial regime of control, Jim’s father brings paternal, metaphysical, and ideological pressure to bear in his relations with Jim. Further, when we take Marlow’s characterization of a son’s entry into the profession of the sea as a “sacrifice” offered up by the boy’s father (LJ, 45) and place it into the specific context of Jim’s relationship to his father, we see a clear complicity between the uncompromising demands of the merchant fleet, the asceticism of Protestant doctrine, and the paternal injunction against the gratification of desire: all three prohibit jouissance and thus generate the construction of compensatory fantasies. When they all come together at once to focus on a young boy, the effect cannot but be profound and lasting. Evidence for precisely this result in Jim’s development comes late in the narrative, when Marlow finds a letter from Jim’s father among Jim’s papers: “. . . a very old letter. It was found carefully preserved in his writing-case. It is from his father, and by the date you can see he must have received it a few days before he joined the Patna. Thus it must be the last letter he ever had from home. He had treasured it all these years.” Despite recognizing the value Jim must have placed on this missive, Marlow moves on to disparage its contribution to understanding Jim, summing up its contents (which he has “looked in at . . . here and there”) by declaring: “There is nothing in it except just affection. . . . There are four pages of it, easy morality and family news” (LJ, 341). He concludes by dismissing it out of hand: “No, there is nothing much in that yellow, frayed letter fluttering out of his cherishing grasp after so many years” (LJ, 342). But Marlow clearly protests too much, and perhaps inadvertently provides the key to interpreting the letter’s contents by dwelling on the circumstances of its composition and the figure of Jim’s father:

Dereliction of Duty 81 The old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and the established order of the universe, but alive to its small dangers and its small mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study, where for forty years he had conscientiously gone over and over again the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the conduct of life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy, over there, on the other side of the earth. (LJ, 341)

The contrast between the setting of Jim’s father’s study and the reality of the distance between him and Jim is startling when Marlow introduces it (we almost expect to read “hearth” where Marlow writes “earth”), rendering at a stroke the connection between the father’s professional, ideological, and ethical situation and Jim’s psychic configuration. What is more, Marlow immediately collapses the very physical distance he has just pointed out, rhetorically asking, “But what of the distance?” (LJ, 341) before slipping into the voice of Jim’s father as it appears in the letter and as it chimes with the elemental components of Jim’s subjective orientation. Now, at last, the stage is adequately set to sustain Marlow’s revelation of the letter’s content, the “easy morality” that so glibly flows from the father’s pen and yet pierces to the heart of Jim’s being so that he preserves and carries the letter with him over the course of his worst defeats and greatest triumphs like a sheet of holy writ: “Virtue is all one over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one manner of dying. He hopes his ‘dear James’ will never forget that ‘who once gives way to temptation, in the very instant hazards his total depravity and everlasting ruin. Therefore resolve fixedly never, through any possible motives, to do anything which you believe to be wrong’” (LJ, 342). After introducing this all-important piece of information, the only instance in which Jim’s past speaks directly, Marlow quickly returns to the banality of family news before once again dismissing any relevance the letter may possibly be thought to have for understanding Jim’s psychic orientation. Taken in the context of its ostentatiously inconsequential setting, the content of Jim’s father’s “easy morality” gives new meaning to the notion of the agency of the letter. We can hear in this voice out of Jim’s past the primal interpellation of the Puritan ethic that informs the mariners’ code and the imperatives of

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emergent Empire. Writing an extension of the Althusserian notion of interpellation well in advance of its theoretical articulation, Conrad takes it down to the most basic moment of subject formation, making Jim’s father the source of Jim’s configuration in the ideological field, and capturing the essence of the subject’s accession to the symbolic as an irreducibly ideological process. Jim’s father’s injunctions (and their ideological correlatives) are thus inscribed on Jim’s psyche as constitutive features of consciousness, instances of the paternal function by which Jim enters the symbolic via a very particular (and particularly demanding) ideological apparatus. Jim responds to his father’s injunctions by seeking replacement satisfactions not in the world around him but in the various fantasies he constructs as compensation for the renunciation of desire to which he is continually exhorted. This tendency draws on the romantic subject matter of Jim’s reading, and manifests itself in his determination to undertake a profession whose official rhetoric of legitimation most closely corresponds to the narrative conventions of adventure romance. The manifest content of his fantasies mimics that of adventure romances, promising Jim the opportunity to realize his desires: He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book. (LJ, 6)

This manifest content only retains its appeal (and its ideological power), however, because of the latent content it conceals. As Jackson has suggested, the kernel of this latent content is the pleasure principle,12 captured in the inevitability with which Jim’s fantasies conclude in his survival and enjoyment of glory. The real work of these fantasies, then, is their suspension of the threat of death posed by the renunciatory imperative taken to its logical conclusion; 12. Jackson, Subject of Modernism, 96.

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though the possibility of death appears on the horizons of Jim’s fantasies, it does so only to heighten the pleasure they provide without ever posing the real threat of extinction that would instantly shatter the fantasy. Drawing on the raw material of adventure romance by which he was interpellated, Jim’s fantasies facilitate his participation in the system of his father’s ideology by keeping from him the traumatic truth at its core. That is, Jim uses the imaginary’s operation of creating an ideal ego as a model for his reconceptualization of the symbolic order into which the paternal function has thrust him. He translates méconnaissance into misrecognition and sets the stage for a catastrophic awakening when the traumatic kernel at the heart of both emerges onto the scene of his consciousness. Thus it is that narcissism rather than devoted self-sacrifice governs Jim’s notion of duty, producing a “fierce” (LJ, 248), “superb” (413), and “exalted” (416) egoism that blinds him to the ill-sutured space between fantasy and reality into which the real threatens to rush at the first sign of crisis. This escapist mentality serves Jim well right up to the moment of the Patna’s collision with the sunken derelict. Until then Jim is able to perform his duty competently, satisfying the imperative to endure hardship by suffering the privations of life at sea and using his fantasies as compensation. Ostensibly in a position of psychic safety because the extreme situations of his fantasies never threaten to become real, Jim is daydreaming only moments before the collision. Interrupted in his reverie by the skipper, he is suddenly forced to confront both the latent content and the managing work of his fantasies when the Patna strikes the derelict. As the severity of the collision dawns on him, his anxiety mounts not so much because he fears the actualization of his fantasies as because he senses the proximity of their hidden content, the approach of the objet a that masquerades as heroic action and glory. Jim’s sudden recognition of this traumatic kernel terrifies him and leads him to reject the formulation according to which he desires the desire of what Lacan calls the Other—the linguistic, legal, and ethical (and by extension, I would argue, ideological) order that configures and situates him. That is, he finds himself beyond the idealized configuration of duty that informs both adventure romance and his fantasies, confronted with the practical exigencies of its official formulation (i.e., the real

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possibility that he will die “in the line of duty”). This vision amounts to a rude awakening for Jim, as he at once encounters the true dimensions of the ideological system to which he belongs and becomes obliquely aware of his own commitment to his survival and enjoyment. Faced with these two distasteful truths, he instinctively opts for the pleasure principle, at once declaring his unwillingness to go “beyond” it and refusing the extortionate demands of a system that would ask him to do so. His leap from the Patna confirms this decision and exposes his fatal flaw, his evasion rather than internalization of the paternal function. In response to this discovery, and as a way of coping with his guilt over his failed interpellation, Jim turns to Brierly and Marlow for the reassertion of the paternal function, seeking at their hands discipline for giving way to his desire to live and for failing to cede his desire to the Other at the crucial moment. In turning to Brierly, who presides over his trial, Jim seeks restoration to the order of renounced desire via the dictum of a surrogate father figure, backed up by the professional and cultural authority of the law. In turning to Marlow, Jim seeks a kind of father-confessor, hoping not simply to expiate his sins, but to rebury the impulse that made him give way to his desire in the first place: that is, to reestablish his subjection to the regime of control he has violated. Neither Brierly nor Marlow is able fully to help Jim in this regard, however, and it takes Stein at last to recognize what Jim needs, and to provide it. Brierly falls short of Jim’s expectations when the tribunal over which he presides cancels Jim’s certificate instead of demanding a renewed declaration of fidelity from him. Far from reenforcing the repressive mechanism by which Jim located himself in the world of the merchant fleet, this verdict expels him from that world, denying him the commandment to restore his psychic integrity that he so desperately wants from it. The situation with Marlow is rather more complex; though he is a father-confessor figure, Marlow has no spiritual or professional power either to punish or absolve Jim: “[M]y absolution . . . would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, which no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices” (LJ, 97). Faced with Jim’s need for something more than simple self-expiating confession and yet unable to provide it, Mar-

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low becomes the agent for Jim’s conscience. He leads Jim to Stein out of a desire to help (i.e., forgive) Jim, which amounts to facilitating, if not enforcing, the penance and atonement that Jim so ardently desires. Stein seems to have a more immediate and intuitive grasp of Jim’s need for expiation through rigorous activity, and he responds to Marlow’s request for help by making Jim his agent in Patusan, cannily bringing together Jim’s Protestant ethic with his own devotion to the spirit of capitalism. Fitting the contours of Jim’s selfdirected penance (selfless devotion to job after job, performing his duties with a maniacal disregard for his own welfare), Stein’s gesture allows Jim simultaneously to revive his ideal ego by reactivating his ideal of duty and to satisfy the basic demands of duty in the secularized Protestant ethic of modernity: “[T]he idea of the duty of the individual towards the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself[,] . . . is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic.”13 This ethic chimes perfectly with the regime of control promulgated by Jim’s father and the social organization he represents, allowing Stein to appeal to Jim’s preexisting psychic configuration in terms with which it is already familiar and to which it is ready to respond. Sending Jim to Patusan as the agent of his trading concern there, Stein thus invokes the Protestant ethic as a psychic truth for Jim, one that will give him the opportunity to overcome his capitulation to desire and to regain control over it without having to abandon his “romantic” character of mind. The next stage in the family romance of Jim’s life comes with Jim’s assumption of supremacy in Patusan, having expelled Sherif Ali, subdued the Rajah Allang, and become the directing force over all trading on the island. Almost from the moment of his arrival in Patusan Jim assumes control over the social manifestation of the paternal function, forcing Sherif Ali and Rajah Allang to rein in their desire and establishing rules of trade that preclude the cutthroat gratification of desire characteristic of Patusan’s anarchic economics. As a result of these exploits Jim finds his authority taking on larger-than-life dimensions in the persona “Tuan Jim.” An instance 13. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 51.

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of the externalized Other, this persona is also the occasion for Jim’s application of the paternal function to himself. Inasmuch as it is not coincident with him per se, Tuan Jim becomes the reservoir for the various strains of desire limited by Jim’s appearance in Patusan. In this superegoic incarnation Tuan Jim also governs Jim’s desire as the trust invested in it by the downtrodden he has helped requires that he guarantee the new order by demonstrating his mastery over his own desire as well. Jim fulfills this responsibility by visiting the Rajah every month to drink his coffee and run the risk that he will be poisoned. Undertaking this ritual regularly and without fail because “many people trust [him] to” (LJ, 251), Jim confronts the temptation of the pleasure principle with an apparent readiness to step beyond it, inviting death as a gesture of his identification with the ethic of renunciation that he imposes on the island. Yet Jim never truly escapes the compensatory mechanism of the pleasure principle, as evidenced by his quick assimilation into a surrogate family. Coming to Doramin with Stein’s ring on his hand, Jim fleshes out the romance convention of the magic token by taking a place in Doramin’s family as a surrogate son, exciting the “motherly fancy” of Doramin’s wife and making a brother of Dain Waris (LJ, 255). The addition of a mother figure to the familial configuration into which Jim inserts himself alerts us to the fact that Jim’s assumption of authority, of control over the paternal function in Patusan, has opened up both the domestic field and the possibility for libidinal gratification. This sense is reinforced by Jim when he situates his surrogate family within the same apparatus of adventure romance by which his “vocation” for the sea declared itself and to which he compares Stein’s gift of the ring: “They are like people in a book, aren’t they?” (LJ, 260). By associating Doramin’s family with the defining register of his fantasies (i.e., adventure romance), Jim as much as declares their status as fantasy figures belonging to the realm of libidinal gratification. As the preeminent family in Patusan, Doramin’s family represents a tradition of bloodlines, inherited power, and romantic convention that accords perfectly with the world Jim wants to erect on the basis of his fantasy constructions. More importantly, Doramin himself, though the representative paternal figure in this part of the story, is by no means the representative of the paternal function for Jim; he occupies a

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space of surrogate paternity that is purely imaginary, articulating an authority that Jim needs to carry out his plans and that he is driven to please, but that he feels no compulsion to obey. The final step in Jim’s accession to a new libidinal space in Patusan comes when he augments his surrogate family situation by taking Jewel as his wife. Drawing on the management of desire he has attained by realizing his fantasy constructions (and aided by Stein’s economic authority), Jim accomplishes this union by displacing Cornelius from his position as Stein’s trading agent and as Jewel’s guardian. The only other white man in Patusan, Cornelius represents the degraded father figure from the world of modernity—the childless, dispossessed, and miserable antithesis of Jim’s father— whose spendthrift irresponsibility and amoral approach to both business and child-rearing deprive him of any claim he might think to lay on Jim’s conscience. Despite this, Cornelius’s status as an afterimage of the paternal function may account for why it takes Jim so long to supplant him and incorporate Jewel into his actualized fantasy construction. (Of course, Cornelius never fully disappears from the scene; rather, he is merely repressed by the ascendancy of Jim’s fantasy constructions, waiting only for an opportune moment to return onto the scene with a vengeance.) The decisive moment in this incorporation comes when Jewel alerts Jim to the presence of assassins in the compound. Up to this point Jim’s efforts to actualize his heroic fantasies of himself in Patusan have been relatively fruitless: the assassins are agents of the Rajah, who remains uncowed; Jim has not yet mounted his assault on Sherif Ali; his dominance over Cornelius remains incomplete; and his desire for Jewel continues to be sublimated out of fulfillment. Though Jewel’s alarm appears to be one in a long line of insubstantial warnings, it gains in credibility because of the libidinal investment she has made in Jim. Marlow insists upon this element as he twice interrupts his narrative of this episode to characterize the story as “a love story” and not an adventure story (LJ, 298, 299); his assertions are backed up by Jim, who registers the profundity of Jewel’s libidinal investment when she tells him that she has watched over his sleep every night: “[I]t was as if he had received a blow on the chest. He gasped. He thought he had been an awful brute somehow, and he felt remorseful, touched, happy, elated” (LJ, 299). The

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libidinal content of their relationship is so near the surface here that it represents a real threat to Jim’s fantasy constructions (still filtered through the lens of adventure romance), and he attempts to break the tension of the moment by “stepp[ing] smartly out of the light” when he “seem[s] to hear the grass rustle” (LJ, 299; my emphasis). The tension continues to build, however, as Jewel urges him to flee to Doramin’s camp and Jim responds with the realization that “for him there was no refuge from that loneliness which centupled all his dangers except—in her. ‘I thought,’ he said to me, ‘that if I went away from her it would be the end of everything somehow.’” Taken with the fact that he and Jewel move hereafter “as if they had been indissolubly united” (LJ, 300), this declaration activates their erotic attachment in an imaginary context, though Jim must still run the risk of death before that attachment can break through the barrier established in his consciousness by his evasion of the paternal function. Thus, when Jim enters the storeroom and one of the assassins charges him with his kris, he does not immediately shoot the man but waits “for the tenth part of a second, for three strides of the man—an unconscionable time” (LJ, 301) in order to extract the maximum possible “reality” from the moment, exposing himself to the threat of death longer than necessary to justify the libidinal desire that has forced this encounter. This short period of time during which Jim intentionally exposes himself to death figures enormously in the economy of desire as he transforms the possibility of his own death into the certainty of the assassin’s death: “He held [his shot] for the pleasure of saying to himself, That’s a dead man!” (LJ, 301). Jim’s pleasure at holding his shot for a tenth of a second describes a pivotal moment in the actualization of his fantasy constructions, as he indulges in precisely the romance dynamic that structures his imaginary, entertaining the possibility of death as an intensifier of the pleasure to be gained from survival and using that possibility as justification for the satiation of desire when the moment of extremity has passed. Indeed, this momentary triumph of will over the impulse to selfpreservation gives Jim the sense of having such extraordinary control over the paternal function and the regime of control it sustains that he is finally able to override it, at last pursuing the outright

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gratification of his libidinal desire for Jewel without the need for further displacement or sublimation. This newfound sense of control finds expression in Jim’s stage management of the remaining assassins’ reenactment of his own leap from the Patna: “ ‘Jump!’ he thundered. The three splashes made one splash, a shower flew up, black heads bobbed convulsively, and disappeared” (LJ, 303). That the assassins jump at Jim’s command (activation of the symbolic) rather than due to his physical force (agency of the real) indicates the extent to which Jim has progressed in reconfiguring reality to coincide with his imaginary construction. By making the would-be assassins jump into the river Jim not only controls his natural impulse to remove all danger that they might return by shooting them on the spot, but also actualizes the compensatory fantasy of his leap from the Patna by remaining behind on shore while others leap for their lives. With this transference of the traumatic residue of his shameful past, complete with its repetition compulsion and the death drive it articulates, Jim feels himself freed from the restrictive world to which that trauma belongs and finally accepts Jewel as his lover/reward: Jim turned to the girl, who had been a silent and attentive observer. His heart seemed suddenly to grow too big for his breast and choke him in the hollow of his throat. This probably made him speechless for so long, and after returning his gaze she flung the burning torch with a wide sweep of the arm into the river. The ruddy fiery glare, taking a long flight through the night, sank with a vicious hiss, and the calm soft starlight descended upon them, unchecked. (LJ, 303–4)

In an exchange of gazes by which they recognize and validate one another’s existence within the same set of conventions, Jim and Jewel ratify their mutual desire. The conventionality of this recognition shines through consistently as they rely on the generic, almost archetypal (not to mention regressive) appellations of “boy” and “girl” when addressing one another (LJ, 321). Moreover, Jim’s experience of breathlessness and paralysis at this moment binds his union with Jewel to the register of desire, fantasy, and the approach to the objet a by evoking his parallel reactions when he imagines the sinking of the Patna (LJ, 86) and when he struggles to free himself from the mud as he flees the Rajah’s compound (254).

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Jim’s triumph marks a crucial point in his construction of the new reality in Patusan: his defeat of the assassins prefigures his defeat of Sherif Ali, his patience in holding his shot prefigures his control over the Rajah, and his union with Jewel ratifies his reconfiguration of Patusan’s social reality according to the dictates of his imaginary construction. Having circumvented death and given rise to the myth of his immortality, Jim no longer labors under the excessive weight of the imperative to make his own survival the sole object of his desire, but achieves more of a balance between the reality principle and the pleasure principle. With the establishment of a system based on the narcissism of his fantasy constructions, his desire becomes a condition of reality that no longer needs to be repressed, allowing Jim to reconfigure his subjectivity by exploring and gratifying his desire for heroic status and libidinal gratification. This reconfiguration restores the overt status of his desire’s sexual content as his relationship with Jewel frees him from the sublimating strategies of adventure fantasies; he allows himself more and more to indulge in the enjoyment accumulated by his incarnation as Tuan Jim. Jeffrey Berman calls attention to the Freudian lexicon according to which “Jewel” signifies female genitalia,14 further suggesting that Jewel’s displacement of survival as the object of Jim’s desire is explicitly libidinal, liberating Jim from the prohibitive imperatives of the paternal function even as it retains (in the new entity Tuan Jim) the drive for recognition that provides the context for his fantasies of survival. If his personal survival persists as a feature of his desire, it does so only as a residual effect in the implied continuity of his family line—an implication that remains imaginary, however, inasmuch as he and Jewel do not have any children. Nonetheless, Jewel’s addition to Jim’s surrogate family structure completes its symmetry, affording Jim the guilt-free enjoyment problematized by his earlier evasive relationship with the paternal function. Further, this restoration of libidinal balance supplements the economic and political stability Jim brings to Patusan, preceding it in a manner consistent with the subject’s need for internal coherence before it can reproduce itself on a larger scale. Indeed, with this multiform gratification of desire, Jim appears to have circumvented the paternal function that has dogged him all his life, lifting the ban on en14. Jeffrey Berman, “Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Enigma of Sublimation,” 393.

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joyment that caused him to construct such elaborate compensatory fantasies and managing a regime in Patusan that guarantees the perpetuation of those fantasies. Gentleman Brown’s arrival in Patusan shatters this assumption, however, revealing that Jim has neither repressed nor circumvented the paternal function, but temporarily deflected it, setting it up in effigy (i.e., Tuan Jim) while he pursues gratification by actualizing his fantasy constructions. Brown’s challenge to the integrity of the order that Jim has constructed out of the raw materials of his imaginary forces Jim to confront the fact that he has been able to gratify his desire only by subjecting competing desires to strict limitations, accumulating the excess in the reservoir of his authority, the persona of Tuan Jim. Tony Jackson articulates the extent to which Jim unintentionally and unwittingly establishes a system of gratification for himself in Patusan: “[H]e remains an unconscious actor throughout and in fact can only play his part so well because he does so unconsciously. Perhaps we should rather say, the part can only play him so well, that is, function unconsciously, because he is so unself-conscious.”15 When Brown and Jim face one another over the empty creek bed, Brown relies on his “satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims” (LJ, 385) to hammer on the obvious disparity between Jim’s imaginary construction of himself as subject to the same constraints as everyone else on the island and the clear fact of his privileged position. When he demands of Jim, “[W]hat the devil do you get for it; what is it you’ve found here that is so d—d precious?” (LJ, 381), Brown strikes at the very heart of the system Jim has set up in Patusan, jabbing at the gratification Jim gains from his position. He follows up this attack by pointing out that the gratification Jim gets from foisting an entire social order upon Patusan is really no different from the selfish impulse that justifies “saving one’s life in the dark” at the expense of “three, thirty, three hundred people” (LJ, 386). This series of chance comparisons and the devilish insight they articulate plays on Jim’s sense of guilt and racial kinship with Brown to provoke a resurgence in the paternal function, revealing its persistence even in the midst of Jim’s actualized fantasy constructions. Jim responds to this resurgence by seeking to manage the paternal 15. Jackson, Subject of Modernism, 101.

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function, embodying its imperatives in a guilty overcompensation that sees him subdue the desire of the war council to his own renunciatory impulse and promise Brown “the clear road” out of Patusan (LJ, 396). To achieve this victory Jim must wager his authority against the integrity of his surrogate family structure, telling the council that if they decide to exterminate Brown and his crew he will withdraw his authority from the undertaking: “‘Then,’ said Jim, ‘call in Dain Waris, your son, my friend, for in this business I shall not lead’” (LJ, 392). This tactic both reveals the fundamental selfishness of Jim’s motives at this point and sets the stage for the violent return of the desire to annihilate the invaders from which he has barred the council. Gambling himself against Dain Waris in the political and libidinal economy of the land, Jim plays a doublesided game in which he uses his superiority as a leader and Doramin’s unwillingness to place his son in jeopardy to carry the debate. Jim’s gambit pays off and he manages to subject the council to his will, seemingly exercising the prohibitive authority of the paternal function over them while he increases the authority of Tuan Jim by accumulating an unprecedented quantity of foregone desire (in its aggressive dimension). Brown and Cornelius (Patusan’s repressed but clearly not foreclosed father figure) do not participate in the economy thus governed by Tuan Jim, however, and when they repay the favor of a “clear road” with a treacherous assault on Dain Waris’s camp all bets are off and Jim must acknowledge the failure of his attempt to manage the paternal function through his compensatory fantasies. Dain Waris’s death in Brown’s attack, along with Cornelius’s pivotal role in it, brings out the specifically domestic dimension of this episode, tying Jim’s personal and political decision directly into the libidinal framework from which he takes his personal and political identity. As the social edifice he has constructed on the basis of his imaginary control over the paternal function crumbles, Jim finds his surrogate family structure likewise compromised by Dain Waris’s death. With his final act, he apparently tries (however futilely) to satisfy the paternal function by submitting to death at the hand of the last of his surrogate fathers, Doramin. Recognizing that the paternal function is impossible ever to control since it is a constitutive feature of his subjectivity, Jim at last attempts to submit to it, living

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up to the notion of duty it comprehends by renouncing his desire completely. This gesture is vitiated, however, by its consistency with the adventure romance configuration of Jim’s fantasies. As Linda Dryden says: “Jim’s decision to meet death at the hands of Doramin is a final romantic flourish. . . . The novel begins and ends with Jim projecting himself as a fictional stereotype.”16 Though Jim welcomes death as a public gesture of submission to the paternal function, he ends by privately subverting that submission, gratifying his desire by uniting with it in the ultimate actualization of fantasy. He does not pass through the fantasy, but identifies with it. Jim’s attempt to redress the gap created in the domestic and political spheres of Patusan by offering his life as atonement for the death of Dain Waris is ultimately ineffective, both as recompense to the paternal function and as an attempt to restore political stability. For Dain Waris is not simply Doramin’s son, but also the only legitimate heir to Doramin’s political power; his death, along with the collapse of Jim’s authority in Patusan, returns the island to a state of “utter insecurity for life and property,” which is “the normal condition” in which Jim found it (LJ, 228). And though Jim’s death leaves the island as yet “not . . . ripe for interference” (LJ, 232) by the imperial powers in the region (i.e., not yet profitable enough to merit colonization), it does not leave “the political horizon empty . . . without intimations of who the architects of the new age will be or what it is they are striving to construct,” as Benita Parry argues. Rather, Jim’s and Brown’s introduction of Imperial operations and principles have, “like a software program that carries a virus along with it,” rendered Patusan ever after susceptible to Empire’s creeping influence and control.17 The novel’s final comment on the consequences of such ideological totalization appears in a libidinal formulation as Marlow tells us that Jim “goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct” (LJ, 416). Capitulating at long last to Empire’s totalizing power over biopolitical production, Jim abandons the effort to escape its imperatives, leaving off his quest for gratification in this world, and remaining forever caught 16. Dryden, Imperial Romance, 192. 17. Parry, Conrad and Imperialism, 97–98; Hardt and Negri, Empire, 197.

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between the illusions of Empire and their inverted reflection in his imaginary construction of Patusan. Thus he leaves Jewel and the possibility of a life somewhere in between these two sets of ideals for the only possible end of desire he can see, death. Bearing witness to the inescapable nature of the psychic paternal function, the drama of Jim’s experience in Patusan also speaks to its specific sociohistorical manifestation as the renunciatory logic of incipient Empire. Jim’s capitulation to, and death as a result of, the totalizing power of the paternal function (in both its psychic and its sociohistorical manifestations) gestures toward the same revelation articulated by Kurtz’s death, namely that the paternal function is always already in excess of the individual psyche and that its authority remains irreducibly corporate in its essence. With this understanding of how Jim’s subjectivity is biopolitically produced and managed by emergent Empire, we can now turn our attention to the more overtly ideological aspect of his subjective evolution: his experience of Empire’s regime of control as slave morality. Typical of most young recruits to the merchant marine, Jim undergoes this transition as his father “sacrifices” him to the authority figures who undertake to remake his subjectivity so that it coincides with his professional obligations. For the origin of how the imperatives of slave morality interpellate and situate Jim in the Imperial social order characterized by the mariners’ code we must return to the primal moment of Jim’s romantic “vocation” for the sea: “The living had belonged to the family for generations; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a ‘training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine’” (LJ, 5). Jim’s decision to go to sea is declared, justified, and executed all in the space of a single sentence. Moreover, Jim does not make the decision, but becomes the object of an external force; the “vocation” is the only subject of the sentence, while Jim is but an object “sent” off for training by some impersonal objective force. At no point are we given an indication that Jim declares his intentions to his parents, and the transition from his experience of the call of the sea to his ensconcement in a “training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine” takes place almost instantaneously. This loss of agency prompts us to seek the source of the voca-

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tion’s power. The quest is complicated by the way in which the secular context deprives the vocation of its traditional appeal to God. If we return to the first part of the sentence, however, we find the secularized modern equivalent to the voice of God in the objective forces of economic necessity. Nowhere mentioned explicitly, these forces appear between clauses as we are told that though “[t]he living had belonged to the family for generations” Jim is “one of five sons” and hence part of a significant strain on his father’s income. In these straitened circumstances any opportunity simultaneously to alleviate the burden on the household resources and to provide for the education and employment of one of the sons carries the force of an impersonal imperative, one that sees Jim “at once” displaced from his family home and sent into training for the merchant fleet. Moreover, the passage ends with a phrase in quotation marks, as this impersonal force speaks up and gives an authoritative accent of inevitability to Jim’s situation. Though the novel provides us with very little detail regarding the kind of regime to which Jim was subjected during his training to be an officer, we are fortunate enough to have Thomas Brassey’s 1877 account in British Seaman of the kinds of ideals promoted by that training. Writing of the Conway, the very ship to which Thomas C. Moser compares Jim’s training ship in his critical edition of Lord Jim, Brassey quotes no less a personage than Queen Victoria herself enumerating these virtues as she awards “a gold medal to the outstanding apprentice on the Conway”: “cheerful submission to superiors, self-respect and independence of character, kindness and protection to the weak, readiness to forgive offence, desire to conciliate the differences of others, and, above all, fearless devotion to duty, and unflinching truthfulness.”18 These values coincide nicely with the kinds of moral, ethical, and metaphysical imperatives held up by Jim’s father. Moreover, the Queen’s articulation of them places the privileged signifier of duty front and center in order to underscore what I have been calling the regime of control or slave morality at work behind them—no mention is made in this speech of loyalty to 18. For Moser’s note on the Conway, see Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Sources, Essays in Criticism, ed. Thomas C. Moser, 4 n. 3; the passage in which Brassey quotes Queen Victoria is in Moses, Novel and Globalization, 87.

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the Crown or to God. Rather, the Queen articulates a very particular set of traits that are conducive to participation in a decidedly rationalized and secularized world of commerce where the abstraction “duty” stands independent of any exalted notion or institution to which one owes one’s duty. As such, duty is wholly portable and contingent upon those who assume the position of authority from which to assign duty (i.e., those who own the ships and the cargo, and who pay the wages). Michael Valdez Moses, from whose research much of this summary is taken, accurately—though problematically—characterizes the intent of this legislated code of conduct thus: [T]he particular form and content of these statutes says a great deal about the kind of character they seek to shape: a modern bureaucratic functionary scrupulously observant of commercial regulations, personal safety, and the protection of property; a modern “soul” whose conduct is incompatible with the traditional autonomy of an aristocratic hero. The comprehensive, intrusive, and detailed nature of these state regulations illustrates the general tendency of Western modernity to rationalize (in the Weberian sense) and discipline (in the Foucauldian sense) the conduct of all citizens, resulting in the homogenization of their “characters.”

Moses’s account here is largely accurate and insightful, but errs by conflating process and outcome. This conflation becomes clear with his claim that “personal safety” is one of the characteristics the process seeks to produce. While such an ethos may well be the outcome of the training process, the code’s injunction to show “fearless devotion to duty” clearly calls upon merchant mariners to be ready to lay down their lives in the name of their profession. As Najder points out, “the view of life historically and philosophically associated with the idea of honour [of which duty is a category, as the French lieutenant’s repeated references to honor make clear (LJ, 148)] makes all value of a man’s existence reside in his actions and the resulting reputation and consciousness, but at the same time commands man to throw away, at any moment of challenge or test, [his life].”19 19. Moses, Novel and Globalization, 88–89; Najder, Conrad in Perspective, 159.

Dereliction of Duty 97 This problem aside, Moses is certainly right when he concludes that the final product of the Conwayesque training regimen can be “officers [who] preserve only the ethical virtues of the Hegelian slave, who value . . . mere life above public esteem,” and that this result “suggests that the bourgeois synthesis of master and slave morality Hegel predicted has failed to materialize.”20 As Queen Victoria’s speech indicates, the intention behind the process is to produce obedient but nonetheless heroic subjects. Put another way, it is to create slavish subjects who will nevertheless behave and think of themselves as masterly. To this end, it urges the officers in training at once masterfully to overcome their fear of death (or to believe that they have) and slavishly to follow the orders of the entity they serve. Indeed, this is the logic at work behind any enterprise that asks its functionaries to face deadly risks for its furtherance and/or the glory of its leader. Clearly, this ideal is missed more often than it is met, and Moses is right to see that the training process often produces slavish subjects who do value their “personal safety” over “public esteem,” whether they are conscious of it or not. In this regard, the process of training men for the merchant marine does produce officers who “preserve only the ethical virtues of the Hegelian slave,” but this preservation is not obvious. Rather, it is conveniently masked from both the mariners and those they serve by the implicit mastery of conscientiously doing one’s duty from day to day—as Jim notably does during the early days of his service. The inaugural moment of vocation that both determines the idealistically masterful orientation of Jim’s subjectivity and endows him with a set of compensatory fantasies is thus reinforced and given a hierarchical framework by the training he undergoes. The resultant biopolitical production of Jim’s subjectivity according to the merchant marine’s regime of control is apparently so effective that he soon achieves the rank of chief mate: “[I]n time, when yet very young, he became a chief mate of a fine 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, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself” (LJ, 10). 20. Moses, Novel and Globalization, 88.

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Indeed, the only such test Jim faces in the early part of his career is that of the rescue attempt launched from the ship on which he is receiving his training, an episode during which we see for the first time Jim’s characteristic response of paralysis when confronted with the conflicting demands of slave morality (which asks him to welcome hardship and self-sacrifice) and his compensatory fantasy constructions (which guarantee his survival and enjoyment). Caught between these conflicting demands, Jim fails to act in time to take part in the heroic effort of the other men on his ship, discovering for the first time the gap between the real exigencies of slave morality and the ideological (i.e., imaginary) compensations by which it is legitimated. This momentary recognition rapidly gives way to the containing power of his interpellation, however, and Jim soon compensates for his failure by blaming the “brutal tumult of earth and sky” for failing to conform to the arrangement of his fantasy, thus reassuring both himself and his fantasy construction of ultimate victory in a more exacting moment of crisis: “When all men flinched, then—he felt sure—he alone would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas” (LJ, 9). The Patna incident is the test case for this compensatory mechanism. It opens with Jim indulging in his fantasies as his watch nears its end, compensating for the drudgery of performing his duty with visions of duty’s imaginary content: “At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality” (LJ, 20). This moment of exalted fantasy is rudely interrupted by the end of Jim’s watch and the arrival of the Patna’s skipper on the bridge, a juxtaposition that calls into question Jim’s faith in the redeeming virtues of his fantasies: “His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep” (LJ, 21). The complacent self-indulgence intimated by the skipper’s personal appearance chimes with that of Jim’s ineffectual fantasies, indicating the extent to which both the skipper

Dereliction of Duty 99 and Jim are fundamentally out of sync with the organizing imperatives of the official system that they serve. Jim appears to be momentarily aware of this similarity as he starts from his reverie when the skipper speaks, passing instantly from a spurious vision of his own invincibility to a vision of “the odious and fleshy figure [of the skipper], as though seen for the first time in a revealing moment, [which fixes] itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love” (LJ, 21). The transition from Jim’s vision of the “secret truth” and “hidden reality” of his fantasy life to “the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love” is too suggestive to be ignored, and I would argue that Jim’s “start” registers a flicker of recognition at the edge of his consciousness that kindles even more in the ensuing crisis. The Patna’s collision with the sunken derelict brings the psychic and the social together, recapitulating the vision of self as other that etches the image of the grotesque skipper on Jim’s brain. Floating upside down just below the surface of the water, the derelict is both a materialization of the Patna’s reflection and an image of the repressed truth of its operation: the power of the profit motive to keep an unseaworthy vessel in service not only as a cargo ship, but also as a passenger vessel, valuable so long as it floats and written off when it goes missing. The derelict represents the repressed content of Empire, returning like its materialized shadow to give the lie to its smooth operation, generating a situation of extremity that forces Empire to expose its principles to scrutiny. Combining the imagery of crossing a Rubicon with the menacing voice of supernatural authority, the collision constitutes a “vocation” that poses a radical challenge to Jim’s, the skipper’s, and the second engineer’s conceptions of the world and their place in it: A faint noise as of thunder, of thunder infinitely remote, less than a sound, hardly more than a vibration, passed slowly, and the ship quivered in response, as if the thunder had growled deep down in the water. . . . The sharp hull driving on its way seemed to rise a few inches in succession through its whole length, as though it had become pliable, and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving the smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped, and the faint noise of thunder ceased all at once, as though the ship had steamed across a narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air. (LJ, 26–27)

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The physical immediacy of this description unites with its suggestion of menace to generate an overall image of visceral stimulus and response, an eruption of the antagonism at the heart of Empire. This eruption quite literally dislocates Jim, the skipper, and the second engineer (though the Malay helmsmen remain solidly in place at the ship’s wheel): “[The second engineer] said ‘Damn!’ as he tumbled; . . . Jim and the skipper staggered forward by common accord” (LJ, 26). Thrown from their positions and, as it were, launched back into the official discourse that they variously disdain, the three men fall into their assigned roles. Without a second thought, Jim follows his captain’s orders to go forward to check on the status of the ship’s one and only bulkhead, finding that though the bulkhead has not been breached, the forepeak is flooding. The inrushing water puts such pressure on the bulkhead that he can feel it “bulge under [his] hand” (LJ, 83), promising a renewed eruption of the “destructive element” (LJ, 214) in which the Patna moves and to which it has now been exposed by an encounter with its own negative in the derelict. The continued physicality of these descriptions emphasizes both the immediacy of the threat posed by the collision and its disruptive power as it robs Jim’s compensatory fantasies of their talismanic guarantee of survival. Struggling to make sense of the threat he has just felt beneath his hand, Jim is overcome by a catastrophic fantasy of death: “His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped—all the appalling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of” (LJ, 88). Perhaps due to the real extremity that provokes it, this fantasy deviates from the normal pattern of Jim’s fantasies, presenting him not with the safe heroism in which his survival is guaranteed, but confronting him with the real possibility of his own death (implied in his visceral reaction to the “appalling” scene he conjures up). Jim’s fantasies of heroism give way to a horrifying glimpse of the real demands of duty that they conceal, inducing a state of anxiety consistent with Lacan’s formulation of what happens when a subject approaches the objet a of desire. As he relates at the trial: “It seemed to take all the life out of my limbs. I thought I might just as well stand where I was and wait. . . . I thought I would choke before I got drowned” (LJ, 86). As I indicated earlier, this episode anticipates

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Jim’s paralytic response to the approach of the objet a in his union with Jewel and his consciousness-depriving terror of death as he flees the Rajah’s compound. Faced with the collapse of the fantasy structure by which his subjectivity is sustained, not to mention its outright end, Jim is momentarily stopped in his tracks by the threat that the Patna may sink, intuiting for perhaps the first time that his fantasy constructions are not “secret truths” or “hidden realities,” but mechanisms of escape from the banal (though terrifying) truths and realities of his life. This discovery is augmented when Jim returns to the bridge to find that all pretense to a code of conduct has vanished and duty has devolved into a parody of romance adventure: “When I got on the bridge at last the beggars were getting one of the boats off the chocks. . . . They tramped, they wheezed, they shoved, they cursed the boat, the ship, each other—cursed me” (LJ, 91–92). This parody takes on a grotesque dimension when the skipper tells Jim that the plan is not to do anything to save the passengers, but to “Clear out” and leave the ship to sink (LJ, 91). Although Jim maintains that he does not “think [he] understood then what [the captain] meant,” he stands once again paralyzed by the sudden revelation of the truth behind the activity he sees: “I didn’t move, I didn’t speak” (LJ, 92). More than simply overwhelmed by the enormity of the activity he sees, Jim is also stunned as the flicker of kinship between himself and the skipper grows into recognition. That is, he simultaneously recognizes the behavior of the captain and crew as dereliction of duty (and thus a violation of the ideological fantasy he has internalized in relation to that signifier) and yet responds to it unconsciously as the organizing principle of his deflection of the demands the official regime makes on him. In a truly dialectical moment, Jim witnesses the collapse of that regime’s official value system, and consequently the collapse of the compensatory fantasy structure (built from the ideals of that system) by which he has thus far avoided acknowledging the regime’s real demands. The disappearance of the official system in a moment of extremity precipitates the collapse of its correspondent in Jim’s psyche. Caught in the midst of this collapse, and presented with the collision between his fantasy’s manifest content and its obscuring operation, Jim remains frozen for most of the crisis. Adopting a

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posture of what Marlow charitably calls “passive heroism” (LJ, 64), Jim is repelled from joining the crew in their grotesque attempts to lower away their lifeboat by his refusal to identify with those lazy sailors whose identifying feature is their “horror of the home service” (LJ, 13). Yet he is simultaneously driven to preserve his own life along with those of any pilgrims who might survive the initial sinking. To this end he momentarily springs into action, cutting loose all the other lifeboats on board: “He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board” (LJ, 102–3). Even this action is abortive, however, as Jim returns to stasis on “the very same spot from which he had started,” remaining trapped between the contradictory exigencies of his will to duty and his instinct for self-preservation (LJ, 103). So profound is the paralysis generated by this conflict that—aside from this brief flurry of activity—Jim remains glued to his spot on the bridge until he registers the death of the third engineer, George, as a physical manifestation of the subjective destitution he himself is experiencing. Though he later claims not to have known that George was dying when he saw him “step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse” (LJ, 107), Jim nonetheless chooses just this moment to break out of his paralysis. Responding to the crew members’ shouts for George to join them in the lifeboat, Jim suddenly finds himself in motion, driven by the overwhelming instinct of self-preservation: “Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low” (LJ, 109). Jim is prompted to act by the crew’s repeated calls of “George!” The repetition of “George,” a signifier without a signified, creates a space into which Jim can rush, a desire other than that of the Other, which he can fulfill by playing dead (i.e., by simulating fulfillment of the Other’s desire). Instinctively seizing upon this play of signification, Jim circumvents duty’s demand that he capitulate to subjective extinction by momentarily suspending subjectivity, and instead drops out of the symbolic order: “It was as if I had jumped into a well—into an everlasting deep hole” (LJ, 111). In this moment Jim experiences the alignment of the béance (the gap between signifiers, the absence that

Dereliction of Duty 103 haunts all presence) of the symbolic order with the déhiscence (the constitutive lack around which the symbolic construction of the subject circulates) of his subjectivity, as he has previously experienced the confluence of ideological misrecognition and subjective méconnaissance. As Jeffrey Berman suggests (and Linda Dryden confirms), “Jim’s jump represents not merely the breakdown of his cerebral control but the return to his most primitive self and to the gratification of the appetitive, anarchic urges he has long repressed.”21 Driven by his subconscious awareness of George’s death, Jim makes a leap whereby he abandons his own subject position for that of George, acting without consciously willing to do so: “[H]e had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke” (LJ, 108). Acting unconsciously, Jim quite literally plays dead, mimicking the extinction of the subject that threatens him both internally (the collapse of his ideological fantasy of heroism with its guarantee of personal survival) and externally (the imperative to “go down with the ship”) to escape the impossible situation arising from the clash of these two systems on the common ground organized by duty. Jim’s deterritorialized status as neither “Jim” nor “George” holds true as he lands in the lifeboat and it pulls away from the Patna, and persists up until the crew discovers who he really is: “They were abusing me—abusing me . . . by the name of George. . . . That little second mate puts his head right under my nose, ‘Why, it’s that blasted mate!’” (LJ, 116). At this point the play of signification opened up by the crew’s repeated cries of “George” ceases, and Jim is resituated in his professional position as the first mate of the Patna. Apparently knowing little else about him except his professional status, the crew address him in the terms provided by the official order they have all just transgressed: for the moment he is only “that blasted mate!” This state of affairs soon gives way to a litany of “horrible names” (LJ, 117), as the crew come to realize their irremediable distance from the official order in which Jim is still a mate and begin to abuse him according to their openly ignoble status (without accepting him as an accomplice in it). That not one of them 21. Berman, “Conrad’s Lord Jim,” 387. See also Dryden, Imperial Romance, 146.

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appears ever to call Jim by either his given or his family name in this turbulent drama of degraded naming marks a new reality for the subject “Jim”: henceforth his subject position is a site of surplus marked by an at-times-embarrassing abundance of names. Having leapt from the ostensible official order on the Patna only to be expelled from its obverse on the lifeboat, Jim responds by cultivating a profoundly ambivalent attitude, at once contemplating suicide and yet remaining vigilant against attack from the others throughout the night and following day. Having once given way to the unconscious truth of his fantasy construction, Jim now works to retain his agency, the power of his conscious will over his own survival. Having fled death, he is now in a position where the contemplation of suicide becomes the pinnacle of pleasurable activity, fulfilling his romantic self-conception and heightening the power of the pleasure principle by incorporating the threat of the “beyond,” just as when he holds his shot in the face of an onrushing assassin. Of course, this is precisely the same dynamic as that which informed his romantic fantasies to begin with, drawing its pleasurable content from the lurking (yet always precluded) threat of death. Jim is prevented from recognizing the fundamental narcissism of this coping tactic by his revulsion for the more obvious selfishness of the crew. In this evasive tactic Jim counters their vulgar self-interest with his own fantasy of compensating for the selfishness of his leap with the supposed selflessness of taking his own life. This distinction allows Jim to reestablish his sense of essential difference from the crew, of being once again in their company but not of it. As a result, he soon recovers enough of his heroic self-image to seek readmission into the official order. Adopting a heroic stance after the fact, Jim determines to submit to the official order’s punitive aspect, facing its condemnation as another element in his life romance that, however devastating it may be from a professional standpoint, still does not threaten his physical survival. As I have shown above, however, the trial to which Jim submits fails to resituate him in the official order of Empire, instead expelling him from its ranks, revoking his certificate, and officially placing him in the same camp with the rest of the crew. This verdict effectively deprives Jim of an objective code of conduct, casting him adrift in the emergent order of Empire and leaving him to find a

Dereliction of Duty 105 new position for himself and a new code by which to live. As a result, he becomes a wanderer, a deterritorialized subject, moving from job to job and enacting the incessant movement of signification and desire that masks the aporias he has exposed and come to embody (i.e., his terror of death and the official construction of duty that reserves the right to demand the ultimate sacrifice of him). Through the advice of Stein, filtered by Marlow, Jim discovers that the only way out of the double bind generated by his failure of slave morality (unable to go home and unable to find a space safe from the encroachments of the symbolic order he flees) is to turn in upon himself, liberating and drawing upon his own fantasy constructions to organize an ideological order with which they will not clash. In a proto-existential moment, Stein indirectly advises Jim to abandon the imperatives of slave morality for the gratifications of master morality: “A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? . . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up” (LJ, 214). Stein’s advice boils down to an injunction to abandon the quest for a solid truth upon which to base one’s conduct, and instead to submit to the “destructive element” of life’s uncertainty, relying ultimately on one’s will alone to arrange it so as to accord most amenably with one’s disposition. To this end Stein makes Jim his agent in Patusan, handing him “a totally new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon” (LJ, 218), a chance to remake himself as well as to reconfigure an entire ethical and ideological system so that it centers on him alone. And indeed, there can be little doubt that Jim does accede to a position of unchallenged authority in Patusan, embodying both legislative and executive arms of governance and making himself the final term of reference for issues of economic and social import. Marlow tells us that Jim “could settle the deadliest quarrel in the country by crooking his little finger. . . . His word decided everything. . . . Thus he illustrated the moral effect of his victory in war”; “his word was the one truth of every passing day” (LJ, 269, 272). There is some uncertainty as to whose words articulate this account

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since it reads as though Marlow is either mimicking or else indirectly quoting Jim himself (complete with such expressions as “Honour bright!” and “No joke!” [LJ, 269]). I am treating it as a fairly accurate rendering of Jim’s authority on the basis of the overall evidence for Jim’s ascendancy in Patusan, though the possibility that this account belongs to the same method of “satisfy[ing] himself” that Jim uses to explain his strange triumph over the Rajah’s minions when he first arrives in Patusan (LJ, 245) deserves some consideration and should be kept in mind. What is clear is that all issues of any importance in Patusan (whether on the small scale of an argument over chickens or on the level of the Rajah’s harassment of traders) refer back to Jim and to Jim alone. Additionally, Jim comes more and more to refer only to himself, remaining aloof even from Jewel: although he is privy to her entire personal history, he refuses to reveal to her his slavish (and therefore shameful) origins. Cracks begin to appear in Jim’s status as master of Patusan, though, as the legend of Tuan Jim that legitimates his new disciplinary regime soon outstrips the man behind it. The legend is initially indispensable to Jim; growing out of his defeat of Sherif Ali, it lends him the quasi-divine aura necessary to his refashioning of the social order after his own image: “Already the legend had gifted him with supernatural powers. . . . As to the simple folk of outlying villages, they believed and said (as the most natural thing in the world) that Jim had carried the guns up the hill on his back—two at a time” as he prepared his assault on Sherif Ali (LJ, 266). Yet, however useful, such popular conceptions trouble Jim, perhaps because he sees in them a suggestion that his word is not followed so much on its own merit as because it issues from an undisputed source of authority: “[The legends] would make Jim stamp his foot in vexation and exclaim with an exasperated little laugh, ‘What can you do with such silly beggars? They will sit up half the night talking bally rot, and the greater they lie the more they seem to like it’” (LJ, 266). Though Jim’s exasperation initially reads as false modesty, it may also indicate that he is beginning to recognize his own romantic tendencies in the Patusans’ mythologization of him. Having his romantic selfconception reflected back at him, Jim responds with unease as it begins to dawn on him that he is not in fact the man of his (and his people’s) imaginary. This flickering self-awareness registers an in-

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tuitive apprehension that, however successful his project of remaking Patusan in his own image may be, he has not yet attained a position of true mastery: he has become a subject of the very disciplinary regime he sought to create and control. Marlow sees this fact much more clearly than Jim does, focusing on precisely this aspect of Jim’s exasperation when he points out that the legend of Tuan Jim is the one aspect of life in Patusan that Jim cannot control: “You could trace the subtle influence of his surroundings in this irritation. It was part of his captivity” (LJ, 266). Marlow’s comment reveals that Jim’s exasperation conceals an anxiety over the tautological situation he has wrought for himself, as he will have to draw on the authority of Tuan Jim to quell the “lies” that legitimate that authority. Following the ineluctable logic of master morality, Jim has inadvertently become subject to the terms of his own mastery. In trying to establish a regime over which he has control, he repeats not only the conditions but also the process of his own subjection: “In fact, Jim the leader was a captive in every sense. The land, the people, the friendship, the love, were like the jealous guardians of his body. Every day added a link to the fetters of that strange freedom” (LJ, 262). In this light, Jim’s insistence on taking the monthly risk that the Rajah will poison him takes on another dimension, one that reveals the exercise as a subtly doubleedged affair in which Jim appears to assert his mastery but in fact only tightens his bondage further. Jim provides the substance of this dual effect when he explains to Marlow that he does not take the Rajah’s coffee out of foolhardiness or self-indulgence but because “[m]any people trust me to do that—for them” (LJ, 251). Jim risks drinking the Rajah’s coffee because it is a public display, an effective dramatization of mastery only insofar as it has an audience. Ironically, this reliance on an audience contributes directly to Jim’s “captivity”: “[T]he gaze of others confirms his identity only at the cost of entrapping it in a fixed, objectified form.”22 Jim’s open admission that he takes the risk of being poisoned at the demand of those he governs reveals the extent to which he has become their subject as much as he is their master. In this inversion Jim experiences firsthand 22. Paul B. Armstrong, The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford, 147.

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the very fact of overdetermination that prevented his full assimilation into the ideological order of the mariners’ code and thus opened the way for his violation of “the one great secret of the craft”—the imperatives of duty in its official configuration (LJ, 45). Supposedly master of the situation (as Tuan Jim), he is in reality (as Jim) subject to the demands of all those for whom he has made himself the final term of reference. These cracks in Jim’s persona as the undisputed master of Patusan split wide open with Brown’s arrival, which represents a call from the outside order to which Jim’s memory of the Patna crisis belongs. Brown’s appearance activates not the official side of that order, but its obverse, the negative space to which Jim was consigned by the Brierly tribunal. He therefore carries with him the connotations of miscarried interpellation, enforced subjection, lost recognition, and reduced status associated with Jim’s expulsion from the order of the mariners’ code. Pirate to Jim’s “lord,” Brown functions as Jim’s dark double, the base practice to Jim’s rhetoric of justice. Jim’s solitary first name supplements Brown’s solitary surname to generate a complete image of the Imperial subject in all its multifaceted strangeness, willful self-referentiality, and bewildered sterility: “[T]here ran through the rough talk a vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts” (LJ, 387). Ostensibly opposites, Brown and Jim discover a profound kinship in the fact that they are both products of the same system, a system that has placed them together on Empire’s shadowy side. Indeed, Brown and Jim are similar enough in these crucial respects that their face-to-face confrontation plays like a dramatization of the mirror stage: “They met. . . . They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances” (LJ, 379–80). Brown and Jim stare at each other in silence, assessing both their similarities and their differences prior to speaking. For Jim, the status of Brown as his quasispecular image provokes a crisis of identity as he once again confronts the image of himself as a seeker of gratification and yet feels compelled to deny that identification in favor of his ideal ego. Brown

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likewise experiences a moment of perplexity as he finds his sense of identification with Jim frustrated by a persistent indefinable difference. As with the Lacanian mirror stage, this difference gives rise to a fundamental antagonism that threatens to erupt into violence. And yet nothing happens. The elaborate staging of a tableau laden with significance breaks off as both men back down from direct confrontation and agree to go their separate ways. Again reverting to the dynamic that structures the mirror stage, Jim and Brown deflect the aggressive tension built up between them seemingly by agreeing to concentrate on their similarities rather than their differences. The “vein of subtle reference to their common blood” appears to overcome their natural antipathy long enough for each to recognize himself in the other and so shrink from the personal damage they would incur in a violent confrontation. The nonviolent outcome of this confrontation indicates that one or the other (or both), for all they posture as masters, remains subject to the slave morality of the very order from which both are alienated. That Jim is the slave in this confrontation becomes clear when we realize that Brown’s appeal to the value system of group cohesion is but a ruse by which he manipulates Jim’s slavish reliance on solidarity. Brown introduces this appeal in terms that make it appear a slavish backing-down, an excuse for not having it out with Jim there and then: “This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat—and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d—d lurch” (LJ, 382–83). In fact Brown is making the most of his diabolical ability to see people’s weaknesses, spuriously laying a claim on Jim’s fetish of solidarity, guessing that Jim will accept the validity of his appeal. This maneuver is truly masterful, as it plays on Jim’s own deepest fear (at base a fear of himself) of having his posture of masterly consciousness exposed as a sham. It leads Jim to acknowledge his thralldom to the demands of responsibility, the very “captivity” of leadership with which Marlow characterizes the “strange freedom” Jim finds in his new role. In accepting the validity of Brown’s appeal to communal fidelity, Jim confesses to his dependence on social interaction rather than pure self-assertion and self-verification,

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simultaneously disqualifying himself from the category of “master” and testifying to the enduring necessity of some larger, external, social order to give meaning to his life. In the context of the background Jim shares with Brown, this outcome marks the return of the repressed social organization against which Jim is in rebellion, exposing it as the organizing principle, and ultimately the invalidating truth, of his claim to mastery. Brown, by contrast, exemplifies the standard of mastery in its raw brutality, amorally using his men’s lives as bargaining chips and never losing sight of his desire completely to subjugate Patusan even as he makes an appeal for his life and the lives of his men according to a standard of decency that is cognate with, if not identical to, that which Brierly articulates in the novel’s opening chapters. Having built up the tension between Brown and Jim and then provided a spuriously simple solution to their conflict, Conrad finally tips his hand and exposes the truth through Brown’s faithless ambush of Dain Waris’s camp. This attack symbolizes the violent kernel at the heart of Empire that Jim’s utopian conceptions seek to expel or occlude. Breaking faith with Jim, Brown exposes the violent threat to organic community that lies dormant in any social organization.23 Through this attack, Brown visits upon Jim the very logic of disobedience and dereliction of duty by which Jim opposed the social organization of the mariners’ code and for which he was expelled from it. The news of Brown’s assault carries this import to Jim even as it goes to the heart of the community he governs, shattering at once the fantasy construction that sustains Jim’s subject position as Tuan Jim and the disciplinary regime it grounds. Jim’s blind adherence to his own imaginary is directly responsible for the attack and he must pay the price for its devastation of the social order. With uncanny diabolism, Brown’s assault does more damage to Jim’s compensatory fantasy structures (on which his entire conception of reality is mounted) than if he had insisted on fighting his way out of Patusan. By killing Dain Waris, Brown bypasses Jim to strike at the heart of Patusan’s political continuity, depriving it of its traditional heir and thus condemning it either to expire in sterility or else to pass through an even worse period of chaos and violent power struggles. 23. See Zˇ izˇek, “The Spectre of Ideology.”

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This collapse of the regime generated by Jim and identified with Tuan Jim coincides with the final collapse of Jim’s own imaginary compensations for the conflicting demands of subjectivity. Having managed in the fallout of the Patna incident to avoid the understanding that his subjectivity is intimately bound up with the social order in which it was produced, Jim now comes to the opposite realization. Faced with the catastrophe of Brown’s treachery, Jim realizes that his subjectivity itself is the problem, that the twin compulsions to seek individual accomplishment and yet to submit utterly to the greater good are contradictory imperatives not just of Empire (as codified and enforced in the mariners’ code), but of his subjectivity as a product of Empire. Retreating into silent contemplation after hearing of Brown’s attack, Jim refuses either to fight or to flee, concluding at last that “[t]here is nothing to fight for [because] nothing is lost” and that there is no point in flight because “[t]here is no escape” (LJ, 412). In what Marlow takes to be “a last flicker of superb egoism” (LJ, 413), Jim at last recognizes that the only way to win his fight, the only way to escape his conscience, is to extinguish the subjectivity that is irreducibly configured by the conflict between its sustaining ideals and the corrosive realities of emergent Empire. Thus, in the poignant finale to Lord Jim, Jim submits to death at Doramin’s hand in a gesture that pretends to concede victory to the paternal function even as it elevates his compensatory fantasy constructions to a new level in the unmitigated self-sacrifice that has been the objet a of his desire from the moment of his first encounter with the romantic literature of sea adventure. Jim’s final act thus simultaneously sustains the claim of his imaginary to heroic, masterly status and yet acknowledges the dead end of its selfreferentiality: “[W]hile Jim stood stiffened with bared head in the light of torches, looking him straight in the face, [Doramin] . . . shot his son’s friend through the chest. . . . They say that the white man sent right and left at all those faces a proud and unflinching glance. Then with his hand over his lips he fell forward, dead” (LJ, 415–16). Facing his executioner in the full acceptance of his sentence, Jim receives the bullet from Doramin in a truly heroic fashion that reveals his act to be not the submission to the paternal function it appears to be, but the final evasion, the ultimate identification with fantasy and gratification. At the same time, Jim dies “with his hand over his

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lips,” indicating both his refusal to cry out at his wound and his recognition that the regime under which “his word was the one truth of every passing day” has ceased to exist (LJ, 272). Indeed, this gesture, the significance of which is almost universally overlooked by critics, indicates the extinction of Jim’s subjectivity in the moment before his death as it graphically captures his refusal of and rejection by the symbolic order. Thrown into the symbolic order by the paternal function at the outset of his life, Jim now finds himself liberated from it for good, translated completely into the realm of fantasy as he suffers Doramin’s paternal vengeance. While such liberation promises to be horrifying in its fleeting transition to death, it also soothes with a return to primary narcissism: “[I]t may very well be that in the short moment of his last proud and unflinching glance, he had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side.” In the moment of supreme knowing that accompanies death, the veil of Maya falls away from Jim’s “opportunity” and he becomes one with his own idealistic conception of a world ordered in his own image: “He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct” (LJ, 416). In death, it seems, Jim attains the self-referentiality he sought to establish in Patusan in the final stages of his lifelong blurring of méconnaissance and misrecognition; freed at last from the interrelated vagaries of subjectivity and ideology, Jim realizes his long-sought union with the “veiled opportunity” of self-coincidence. Of course, Jim cannot tell us any of this outright, and Conrad evokes Marlow’s characteristic skepticism to suggest that only by looking within ourselves for the conflicted site where the psychic and the social collide can we determine whether even death provides the escape from the condition of subjectivity as it is configured and governed by the totalizing order of modernity: “Is he satisfied—quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us” (LJ, 416). Recognizing and putting into practice the epistemological and ideological limits bound up with his conception of modernity and subjectivity, Conrad refuses to take a definitive position on the issue of whether or not Jim finally achieves satisfaction, leaving us with Marlow’s speculative questions and tentative constructions to offset the suggestion that any such liberation has taken place for Jim.

Dereliction of Duty 113 Despite this tentativeness, a striking number of critics—including Watt, Berman, Richard Stevenson, and Gustav Morf—have read Jim’s death in a positive light.24 By contrast, I contend that in the end Marlow articulates an unanswerable question that gestures beyond the limits of its posing, not affirming the existence of a space beyond ideology, but maintaining its possibility. Marlow’s tentativeness at the end of the narrative suggests that far from witnessing the extinction of Jim’s conflicted subjectivity and the social order from which it issued and which it reproduced, we in fact witness only the point at which Jim’s “shadowy ideal of conduct” finally cancels itself without allowing the possibility of undoing its influence. We are left only with Marlow, the quizzical skeptic whose lone voice in the darkness sustains what seems an overfine distinction between necessity and truth, implying that alternative versions of necessity (but never truth) remain viable, even if he cannot say exactly what they might look like.

24. Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century; Berman, “Conrad’s Lord Jim”; Richard Stevenson, “Stein’s Prescription for ‘How to Be’ and the Problem of Assessing Lord Jim’s Career”; Gustav Morf, “Lord Jim.”

3

 Our Man in Sulaco

Despite the prevalent critical opinion that Nostromo falls off in its last two chapters, it is perhaps the most sophisticated and most complete of all of Conrad’s novels. It takes up many of the issues treated in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” and “An Outpost of Progress,” but magnifies their treatment to contrast explicitly the forces of capitalist globalization with the nationalist impulses behind nineteenthcentury imperialism. This magnification perhaps accounts for Conrad’s sense of Nostromo as his “largest canvas,” an assessment that has been backed up repeatedly by critics, some of whom have seen fit to compare its historical and geographical vision to that of War and Peace.1 In recognition of this aspect of the novel, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and Arnold Bennett stated in letters to Conrad that they thought of the novel as being named “Costaguana” and “Higuerota,” respectively, objecting to the narrow focus implied by “Nostromo.”2 In making these suggestions, however, Cunninghame Graham and Bennett failed to see that for Conrad, the fictional Republic of Costaguana, its mountain Higuerota, South America, and 1. Joseph Conrad, author’s note to The Secret Agent, ix. For comparisons to War and Peace, see Watt, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo, 19, and Jocelyn Baines, “Nostromo: Politics, Fiction, and the Uneasy Expatriate,” 86–87. 2. Graham and Bennett quoted in Watt, Nostromo, 14–15.

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even the atmosphere of incipient global modernity were little more than setting if taken in isolation from their effects on individuals. Avrom Fleishman extends this limitation to the realm of ideological criticism, arguing that “it is possible to read . . . Nostromo as a record of the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist—and, prospectively, to post-capitalist—society,” without granting any significance to Nostromo’s development as a psychological subject who registers these changes as the content of his lived experience. Indeed, Fleishman elides the specificity of Nostromo’s experience by arguing that “Nostromo’s career represents the history of the entire class, the proletariat—its enlistment and exploitation in the industrialization of the country, its entry into the separatist revolution . . . , its growth of self-consciousness and discovery of an independent political role, its temptation by the materialistic drives of capitalism, and its purgation by traditional idealists in its own camp.” Fleishman’s comments are representative of a tendency among politically concerned critics like Said, Watt, Albert J. Guerard, Claire Rosenfield, and Alan Friedman to minimize the importance of reading Nostromo as a subject in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of the novel’s political critique.3 In contrast to this kind of critical dismissal of Nostromo’s importance to the novel’s critique of modernity, I would argue that the key to reading Nostromo lies in recognizing that, for all that the majesty of its scale seems to diminish the importance of individual experience, it remains a focused vision of the human experience of modernity. Though Conrad treats the enormous modern conflict of nationalist reterritorialization versus the insidious deterritorialization of Empire, he still manages to retain the focus on individual experience that I will argue is at the heart of, and the best way to approach, his critique of modernity. The fullness of the novel’s treatment of the continuity of the individual with the political allows Conrad to include such disparate external forces as a multinational populace, American capital, European ideals, and a colonial history, and still create the intimate detail necessary to his project. 3. Avrom Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, 171, 163–64. See also Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist; Claire Rosenfield, Paradise of Snakes: An Archetypal Analysis of Conrad’s Political Novels; and Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel.

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The social organization by which Conrad metonymizes Empire in Nostromo is that of Sulaco society as it is organized and governed by the Gould Concession, the silver mine over which the Gould family holds the rights of development. The notion of material interests is at the heart of this social organization, and operates as perhaps the chief rhetorical trope (and certainly the most commented-on aspect of the novel) by which Conrad explores the incommensurability between ideological identifications and the activities they legitimate. As Fredric Jameson demonstrates, the paradoxical nature of the phrase “material interests” captures the contradictory tensions of capitalism as both an ideology and a practice: The whole drama of value and abstraction is concentrated in this antithetical phrase, in which the ideal sentimentalism of the capitalist dynamic is suddenly and brutally demystified. If it is “material,” then it is immanent in our earlier sense, and at one with simple selfishness and egoism; if it can be isolated as an “interest,” that is an abstractable value, then it is no longer material in that earlier sense but transcendent. But to be able to conceive of the specificity of capitalism would be to hold both these incommensurable and irreconcilable things in your mind at once, in the unity of a single impossible thought, whose meaningless name [i.e., “material interests”] Mrs. Gould finds herself condemned over and over to murmur.4

As Jameson makes clear, the label “material interests” captures the confluence of two “incommensurable and irreconcilable” impulses. It represents both the ideology of material practice and the material practice of ideology. Other critics, including Jim Reilly, Arnold Kettle, and Benita Parry, bear out Jameson’s characterization and extend it into even more orthodox formulations of Empire’s relation to capitalist ideology. Reilly’s account of the similarities between “material interests” and Marx’s conception of the commodity places Jameson’s insight alongside Kettle’s insistence that the ideas in Nostromo bear a close affinity to those of Marx and Engels. Parry reinforces this understanding of Conrad’s attitude toward modernity as she aligns him with Max Weber, arguing that “against the mystification of the profit motive and the idealism of economic activities . . . the fiction’s discourse mobilizes a relentless attack, and the illegitimate joining of utilitarianism with idealism is condensed in the 4. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 278.

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key-phrase ‘material interests.’ ”5 The comments of Jameson, Reilly, Kettle, and Parry together represent a long-standing critical awareness of how the paradox of “material interests” harbors an intimate truth about the paradoxical logic of capitalist expansion by which Empire steadily creeps toward global hegemony. More to the point, and all the more striking, is Conrad’s own formulation of the paradoxical relationship captured in his term, both in Nostromo and in the essay “Autocracy and War.” In Nostromo he provides an implicit critique of material interests by having Gould, Holroyd, and Sir John advertise the virtues of material interests even in the face of their obvious detrimental effects. One of the chief justifications offered by Charles Gould for his obsession with making his mine viable is that it will bring “law, good faith, order, security” (N, 84) to Sulaco, both by way of and in order to facilitate the development of material interests. Yet the improvements Gould proposes to bring to Sulaco by “pin[ning his] faith to material interests” (N, 84) are clearly not to be taken as the realization of a universal principle of individual fulfillment. Rather, they are part and parcel of the hegemony to be established when Empire reaches the apex of its expansion and begins, in Holroyd’s words, “giving the word for everything: industry, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion” (N, 77) as a necessary outcome of the capitalist manifest destiny that drives global modernization. Though Holroyd is speaking specifically of America, he is clearly an international figure: “his parentage was German and Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French blood” (N, 76). Moreover, Hardt and Negri show clearly that American supremacy is but another mask of Empire, even going so far as to argue that the U.S. Constitution articulates the principles by which the multitude at once constitutes and harbors the potential to overthrow Empire. Complicating the basic tension in Holroyd’s formulation is the fact that the “legality” (N, 117) and “order” that will follow on the establishment of material interests are not to be sought for their amelioration of the human condition, but because they are vital to the development of those very interests: “Good faith, order, honesty, peace, were badly wanted for this great development of material interests” (N, 117). In all 5. Jim Reilly, “A Play of Signs: Nostromo”; Arnold Kettle, “The Greatness of Joseph Conrad”; Parry, Conrad and Imperialism, 115.

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respects, the law and order that form the ideological justification for adherence to “material interests” are the law and order of material interests, belonging to them, serving them, and reproduced by them in precisely the same way as ideology reproduces its own imaginary constructions to perpetuate the existing relations of production. In “Autocracy and War” Conrad leaves nothing to chance, laying bare the manipulative and mercenary motivations that underwrite the capitalist fantasy of a universally beneficial adherence to material interests. Reintroducing material interests to his analysis of contemporary culture just one year after publishing Nostromo, Conrad exposes their diabolical potential as the legitimating ideology of capitalist expansionism: Industrialism and commercialism . . . picking up coins behind the severe and disdainful figure of science whose giant strides have widened for us the horizon of the universe by some few inches— stand ready, almost eager, to appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the earth has shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell or so. And democracy, which has elected to pin its faith to the supremacy of material interests, will have to fight their battles to the bitter end, on a mere pittance . . . for the privilege of improving the nigger (as a buying machine). (NLL, 107)

Reducing the “ideal sentimentalism of the capitalist dynamic” to its real status as “a brazen-faced scramble for a constantly diminishing quantity of booty” (N, 115–16), Conrad reveals his conception of material interests in a viciously satirical critique of the excesses of capitalism in its most vulgar and dehumanizing capacity. This same conception is given a harshly satirical bent in Nostromo with the rapacious Pedrito Montero’s claim that his grab for power stands in the tradition of the French Revolution and paves the way for “[i]mperial democracy” as “the power of the future” (N, 405). What is more, the specific terms in which Conrad articulates his suspicion of material interests in “Autocracy and War” uncannily anticipate Deleuze and Guattari’s assault on capitalism (for its efforts to reduce individual subjects to producing- and desiring-machines),6 and points to his acuity in recognizing that the “legality, . . . good 6. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

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faith, and order in public life” (N, 117) facilitated by material interests are irreducibly ideological constructions in the service of vested interests. Yet, for all that they are ideological, these constructions, if they are effectively to configure a social organization like that in Sulaco, require a material foundation. In Nostromo this foundation is the silver of the San Tomé mine. As the material manifestation of the “immense occult influence of the Gould Concession” (N, 117), the silver sets the pace, limits, and structural integrity of life in Sulaco. The fetishization integral to this status appears in Conrad’s description of Emilia’s attendance at the production of the first silver ingot from the mine as that of a priestess consecrating a mystical object: On the occasion when the fires under the first set of retorts in their shed had glowed far into the night she did not retire to rest on the rough cadre set up for her in the as yet bare frame-house till she had seen the first spungy lump of silver yielded to the hazards of the world by the dark depths of the Gould Concession; she had laid her unmercenary hands, with an eagerness that made them tremble, upon the first silver ingot turned out still warm from the mould; and by her imaginative estimate of its power she endowed that lump of metal with a justificative conception, as though it were not a mere fact, but something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true expression of an emotion or the emergence of a principle. (N, 107)

Touching the lump of silver with trembling, innocent hands (innocent not only of sin or defilement, but of “even the most legitimate touch of materialism” [N, 75]), Emilia performs an implicit rite of baptism and consecration, turning the “insignificant object, that looks . . . very much like a piece of tin” (N, 107) into a fetish, the shibboleth of material interests. This production of a capitalist fetish profanes the Mosaic antecedent upon which it draws, as the Goulds establish the mine as the first institution in Sulaco’s new Imperial order: “Mrs. Gould’s ride with the first silver escort to Sulaco was the closing episode of what she called ‘my camp life’ before she had settled in her town-house permanently, as was proper and even necessary for the wife of the administrator of such an important institution as the San Tomé mine. For the San Tomé mine was to become an institution” (N, 110). Cast in terms of a return to the life of human social interaction after a sojourn in the wilderness, Emilia’s

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entry into Sulaco with the silver signals the advent of a new era. Her arrival partakes of the establishment of a social order that is not merely “proper” but “necessary” in the eyes of Sulaco society, and that makes the San Tomé mine into “a rallying-point for everything in the province that needed order and stability to live” (N, 110). What marks the mine off from other institutions is its quick supersession of all existing political institutions in its direct appeal to the higher law of material interests. As the biblical parallel falls away and the Gould Concession dominates the political life of Sulaco it becomes clear that Conrad is writing about material interests not as yet another manifestation of an existing sociopolitical structure or dynamic, but as something new in Costaguana: the arrival of Empire. As Althusser reminds us, even those ideological constructions grounded in material fetishes rely on institutions for their perpetuation and dissemination. Chief among these for both Althusser in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” and for Conrad in Nostromo is the law. The central importance of the law in Althusser’s conception of interpellation appears in his use of the example of a policeman’s hail to illustrate the transformation of a lawless individual into an ideological subject. The social institution of the law provides the ground upon which conceptions of subjectivity and ideology are built according to the interested proliferation of a particular set of imaginary relations to the real conditions of production, all of which are governed by the dominant interests of the state. While particular ideologies may come and go, then, the structural necessity of ideology, with its concomitant elements of the subject and the law, remains an enduring feature of all human society. For Conrad in Nostromo, the law is similarly central to the operation of material interests as both an ideology and a material practice, though the first order of business is to do away with the dominance of the state in any conventional sense. Working with a prescient vision of Empire as functioning beyond the purview of any straightforwardly national or political position, Conrad explores the hitherto uncharted territory of how such a postnational ideology can reconfigure and deploy existing institutional apparatuses to accommodate its new regime of control. This new regime’s

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supersession of the residual local institution of law enforcement appears clearly in a summary of some of the effects the Concession has on life in Sulaco. In it, we find that “the outward character of the crowds on feast days on the plaza before the open portal of the cathedral” (N, 97) has changed due to the abundance of miners sporting the colors of the San Tomé mine. The mine’s colors are white, suggesting purity (racial and otherwise), and green, the color of the “little wooden bridge” that connects the mine to the town, “the colour of hope” (N, 99), and the color of the American dollars that flow into the region to finance the mine and all its attendant developments. This livery has a near-magical effect on the miners, using the higher law of material interests (embodied in the institution of the Gould Concession) to protect them from the traditional excesses of local law enforcement: “A peaceable Cholo wearing these colors . . . was somehow very seldom beaten to within an inch of his life on a charge of disrespect to the town police” (N, 97). More than simply upholding the tenuous property rights of the Gould Concession (the miners are, after all, but “human resources” of the mine), the reorientation of the law under the influence of material interests establishes a regime of control under which local government is superseded by commerce and the residual legal apparatus is replaced by a new corporate structure. Further, this shift in power is so complete that the elimination of such liberties traditionally within the province of the local lawmen need not even be a disciplinary operation but succeeds simply by the alchemy of influence and power generated by material interests. Moreover, the establishment of a new regime of control extends beyond the jurisdiction of Sulaco to the entire Republic, as a miner wearing the colors of the San Tomé mine is also exempt from “being suddenly lassoed on the road by a recruitment party of lanceros” (N, 97). Just as the traditional revelries of Sulaco lawmen are curtailed by the power of the mine, so this brutal recruiting practice, previously “looked upon as almost legal” (N, 97), suddenly ceases in the face of the Concession’s spreading power. This new state of affairs is a result of Nostromo’s authority as a disciplinarian, itself a direct continuation of his economic role as the prime facilitator of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company’s business in Sulaco. The clearest expression of this new regime of control

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as it is embodied in Nostromo comes in the description of how he manages to get his cargadores to work the day after one of their routine strikes (on every bullfight day). Rising before dawn, Nostromo begins his workday in the character of a law enforcer, invading the homes and lives of his workers to get them on the docks before sunrise: [T]he morning after each fiesta, . . . the appearance of a phantom-like horseman mounted on a silver-grey mare solved the problem of labour without fail. His steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. (N, 95–96)

This complex mixture of associations extends one step further into the realm of ideology as Nostromo backs up his ominous and threatening appearance at the threshold of his workers’ homes with a literal interpellation that situates them as subject to the regime of control he represents: “He called out men’s names menacingly from the saddle, once, twice. The drowsy answers—grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or deprecating—came out into the silent darkness in which the horseman sat still, and presently a dark figure would flit out coughing in the still air. Sometimes a low-toned woman cried through the window-hole softly, ‘He’s coming directly, señor,’ and the horseman waited silently on a motionless horse” (N, 96). This penetration of domestic space by the official arm of the O.S.N. Company takes on a more explicitly disciplinary tenor when Nostromo has to respond to a particularly recalcitrant cargador: “[I]f perchance he had to dismount, then, after a while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious scuffle and stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head first and hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of the silver-grey mare” (N, 96). The greater the resistance Nostromo encounters in his attempt to enforce the prerogatives of the O.S.N. Company, the more his actions resemble those of a law enforcer dealing with a criminal—if a cargador resists

Our Man in Sulaco 123 his first few attempts to use the power of interpellation to subject him, Nostromo has the authority to go into his house and physically subject him to the demands of his employer, literally throwing him out of the private space of the home and into the public space of the world of work. With Nostromo acting as enforcer, virtually no space in Sulaco is free of the company’s regime of control; Nostromo’s personal ferocity combines with the elevation and power lent to that ferocity by his association with the O.S.N. Company and the Gould Concession (captured in his “silver-grey” “steed”) to demonstrate the pervasive intermingling of the law and material interests in the Imperial development of Sulaco. Finally, the temporal situation of this scene in the predawn hours deserves comment for its contribution to the overall tone of the drama it plays out. Nostromo sets out on his errand in the dark, well “before the Indian market-women had opened their mat parasols on the plaza, when the snows of Higuerota gleamed pale over the town on a yet black sky” (N, 95). For all its outward appearance of law enforcement and official sanction by the offices of the O.S.N. Company, Nostromo’s infiltration of the “slums” where his underlings live nonetheless has a clandestine feel about it, as though it were somehow illicit and in need of concealment from public knowledge or official acknowledgment. Indeed, this sense of shady operations forms the operative logic behind the narrative’s stubborn delay in naming Nostromo (even as he uses the power of his men’s names to browbeat them from their beds), and points to the coercive dark side of burgeoning material interests as they replace a corrupt legal apparatus with a rather more careful but no less arbitrary and invasive system of management. The importance of setting Nostromo’s shadowy exercise of power in the darkest hours is borne out with the appearance of Captain Mitchell on the waterfront “at sunrise” (N, 96). The voice of official history in the novel, Mitchell does not see how Nostromo manages to solve “the labour problem,” and only registers the other man’s success at having “the lighters already under way, [and] figures moving busily about the cargo cranes” (N, 96). Further, it is only at this point in the description of Nostromo’s management of “the labour problem” that he ceases to be simply an anonymous figure and is openly named as “the invaluable Nostromo, . . . bawling

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orders from the end of the jetty in a stentorian voice. A fellow in a thousand!” (N, 96). Seeing only that aspect of Nostromo’s industry and dedication that takes place in the light of day, Captain Mitchell remains blind to the brutalizing side of that activity and hence to the enabling role played in it by the O.S.N. Company’s need for ever-greater levels of efficiency if it is to keep up with the mine’s ever-increasing levels of production. In Hardt and Negri’s terms, Mitchell sees only the smooth operation of the regime of control but misses its fundamental reliance on (the threat of) disciplinarity. Nostromo’s accession to the role of chief disciplinarian glaringly reveals the elevation of material interests (with their accompanying institutional apparatus) to juridical status as the new Imperial order supersedes the residual sociopolitical order. The only successful police action reported in the novel is the direct result of Nostromo’s intervention “by disclosing to the then chief of police the presence in the town of some professional thieves,” though even this cooperative act is vitiated by the fact that Nostromo informs on the thieves only because they are in town “to wreck and rob [the O.S.N. Company’s] monthly pay train” (N, 320). That Nostromo only enforces (or helps to enforce) the laws that directly benefit his employers (or those in whose business the O.S.N. Company has a vested interest, like the Gould Concession) comes through all the more clearly in his willing and easy interaction with various salteadores, with the members of Hernandez’s band, and possibly with Hernandez himself. Whenever force is required to defend the material interests behind this configuration, Nostromo and his cargadores control the mob. When the mob begins to turn on the fugitive Ribiera, Nostromo instantly neutralizes the crowd with a signal to his cargadores, thus gaining enough time to come to the rescue of the fallen dictator: “[H]e took out the silver whistle he is in the habit of using on the wharf . . . and blew into it twice, evidently a preconcerted signal for his Cargadores. He ran out immediately, and they rallied round him” (N, 225). Nostromo’s management of the mob in this case is marked by two particularly relevant details. The first is that the whistle he uses is silver and a symbolic reminder of the mine’s pervasive influence. The second detail is that Nostromo and his cargadores act exactly as though they are still at work on the wharf. Nostromo’s signal is practically a bosun’s blast, and his cargadores

Our Man in Sulaco 125 respond to the call to control an unruly mob with the same alacrity they bring to loading and unloading cargo lighters on the docks. So completely are the cargadores subjected to the regime of control Nostromo represents that they are almost effortlessly converted from a body of longshoremen in the service of material interests into a standing militia for their defense. This exhibition of the power of Empire to reproduce itself not only in the ideological field that governs life in Sulaco (redrawing the lines between good and bad, lawful and lawless) but also in the consciousness of its subjects exposes the extent to which the ground of the law in Sulaco has shifted from what is represented as its unstable civic basis to its deeply rooted economic basis under the flourishing Gould Concession. More significantly, it demonstrates the importance of Nostromo to this process; without his charismatic control over his workers, no such transition would be possible in the absence of a much larger militia than the mine’s small security force—a band made up of “many an outlaw and deserter—and even some members of Hernandez’s band” (N, 110), whose sole mandate is to protect the mine from direct assault. Finally, the composition of this band further establishes the supersession of traditional definitions of legality and illegality by the material interests of global capital. Simultaneously idealist and materialist, the material interests clearly mark out ground for critique in Conrad’s lexicon, as evidenced by his discussion of them in “Autocracy and War.” In Nostromo material interests appear in the guise of the Gould Concession, which, as an institution, uses the fetishized power of silver to establish an emergent social organization. This organization, with its foundation on material interests and financial support in the form of international venture financing from Holroyd, is enforced upon Sulaco not only by the ubiquitous trickle-down effects of economic development, but also by the application of a corresponding law. The mechanisms of disciplinarity and control by which this new Imperial order is produced manifest themselves in the figure of Nostromo, who not only embodies the subjective reconfiguration wrought by incipient Empire (he is the consummate company man), but also enforces the subjection of the cargadores in his charge by using his authority to collapse the distinction between the public and the private. With this development, material interests are established

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as the predominant social organization of Nostromo, the backdrop of metonymized Empire against which the plight of the Imperial subject will be laid out and anatomized in the remainder of the novel. One of the most important—though often neglected—ways in which Nostromo addresses this plight originates in Charles’s decision to reopen the mine and his father’s ironically motivational prohibition of that activity. Though Nostromo is the central figure in the novel and participates in a family romance of his own, I will focus on that of Charles Gould because his family romance is more completely developed. (I will later discuss Nostromo’s family romance in the context of his attempted transition from slave morality to master morality.) Perhaps the prime ingredient in the Gould family romance is Gould senior’s repeated demand that his son never undertake to work the mine: “He implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to claim any part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the infamous Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to forget that America existed” (N, 57). Virtually a textbook example of the Lacanian paternal function, Gould senior’s interdiction operates as an attempt to establish the word of the father as a law to which the son must submit. In an added twist, the prohibition is cast in terms of an injunction against claiming an inheritance, making the mine into a family heirloom to which Charles has an indisputable right, but which he is denied by his father’s seemingly arbitrary exhortations. As one might expect, the paternal interdiction of Gould senior only excites Charles’s interest in the mine as it makes the Concession an object of mystery, speculation, and occult attraction: “To be told repeatedly that one’s future is blighted because of the possession of a silver mine is not, at the age of fourteen, a matter of prime importance as to its main statement; but in its form it is calculated to excite a certain amount of wonder and attention” (N, 57). Interestingly, rather than emphasizing the content of Gould senior’s prohibition, Conrad points out that its form is the important part; what is placed out of Charles’s reach is not as important as the fact that a limit is being set. This establishment of a limit is the salient element of Gould senior’s prohibition against working the mine; its force as an external manifestation of a preexisting psychic configuration is supplemented by its source so that the idea of working the

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mine becomes more and more tempting to Charles as he meditates on it for the remaining six years before his father dies. When Gould senior dies, Charles exhibits idiosyncratic behavior that dramatically illustrates the power the mine exerts over him. Upon hearing of his father’s death, Charles walks “straight out of town with the news, straight out before him in the noonday sun on the white road, and his feet had brought him face to face with [Emilia] in the hall of the ruined palazzo” (N, 61). As though the momentum of his liberated desire were not to be so easily abated, Charles no sooner announces that the mine has killed his father than he and Emilia go “out for a long walk” to discuss the situation, as Charles already begins to formulate a conception of himself taking over the mine: “But if he had only grappled with it in a proper way!” (N, 62). Only when Charles definitively announces his intention to work the mine and proposes to Emilia in the same breath does he come to a halt: “The only thing he wanted to know now, he said, was whether she did love him enough—whether she would have the courage to go with him so far away?” (N, 63). When Emilia answers that she will marry him, they turn back; with her concession and the sense of having discovered his vocation in making the mine profitable, the momentum of Charles’s desire recedes enough that he can again heed his conscience and go to work reestablishing the paternal prohibition as an internalized injunction to enjoy the objects of his desire as little as possible, recontaining his desire in the rigid conduct of both enterprises to the benefit of the mine and the detriment of his marriage. Following a pattern similar to that by which Jim reproduces in Patusan the very order from which he was expelled, Charles justifies his disobedience with the very logic of canceling and preserving that will become the legitimation of his entire enterprise in Sulaco: he cancels his father’s prohibition (“It was imperative sometimes to know how to disobey the solemn wishes of the dead”) only to preserve it in the name of the “justificative conception” of law and order as natural consequences following on the establishment of material interests (N, 66, 107). Charles’s cancellation of his father’s prohibition is no simple act of rebellion, but an attempt to redeem his father’s early death and to reestablish the Gould Concession (i.e., his inheritance and therefore the family honor) as the

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marker of a limit that only it can safely transgress: “The very prohibition imposed the necessity of success. It was as if they had been morally bound to make good their vigorous views against the unnatural error of weariness and despair” (N, 74). Initially motivated by the most basic logic of transgression (the desire to do that which is most often and most vehemently forbidden), Charles quickly accedes to a more complex logic, characterized by his belief that by transgressing his father’s prohibition and making the mine viable again he can triumph against the Costaguanan regime that broke his father’s fortune and spirit, simultaneously rebelling against his father’s word and redeeming his father’s life. In his endeavor to reestablish the Gould Concession as “a power in the land” (N, 110), Charles turns his transgression of his father’s interdiction into fulfillment and redemption. In the process he both cancels and preserves the function of the paternal law by elevating his inheritance so that it supersedes and contains the existing iniquitous laws of the land. That is, he reproduces en large the very mechanism of interdiction whose violation forms the inaugural moment of his enterprise. To this end he draws on the ideological power of the fetishized silver to embody that excess enjoyment toward which all prohibition gestures. The silver thus functions as both the material object of desire and the limit of accessibility, registering the psychic fact of desire’s insatiability in the economic conception of supply’s inadequacy to demand. As such, the silver becomes the emblem of that cursed inheritance the possession of which he attempts to make good, justifying his transgression in the establishment of the law of his father as an institutional fact and social imperative. Charles’s violation of his father’s prohibition thus assumes a complex relationship to the mine itself, instigating a constant process of emptying the mine of its treasure as an almost allegorical justification of his emptying of his father’s symbolic prohibition. As Charles initially encounters it in his father’s letters, the mine functions as an absent signifier denoting nothing more than a hole around which Gould senior’s law is structured; it is an unproductive pit that serves as a pretext for the Costaguanan government’s gradual emptying of Gould senior’s fortune. When Charles comes to Costaguana, however, he finds that the mine is not the void he had believed it to be, but the source of a treasure that can be made

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to signify if it is managed correctly. Just as his decision to violate his father’s prohibition entailed a reconfiguration of what that prohibition actually demanded, so the economic reversal of making the mine profitable entails a reconfiguration of the surrounding social conditions as Charles replicates in concrete circumstances the production of meaning and characteristic of the symbolic order. Accordingly, Charles takes his father’s prohibition and makes the void around which it seemed to circulate generative of an entire sociolinguistic regime of production and deferral. As Charles tells Emilia: “Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. 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 be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope” (N, 84). Gould recognizes the treasure (both material and ideological) hidden in the mine and discovers in himself the ability to make the void produce not only profit, but also an entire order of meaning. Taken with his barren marriage and Decoud’s characterization of the mine as Gould’s mistress (N, 245), Gould’s generative success where his father had failed bespeaks a completion of the oedipal pattern of his enterprise. In his perpetually renewed violation of his father’s prohibition he usurps his father’s place—the only difference is that he does not beget children with his own mother, but begets an institutional version of himself, a solipsistic order that sterilizes him by siphoning off his libidinal energy and that pits him against himself in an archetypal vision of alienation and reification. The process of generating profit from the mine thus constantly increases the value of prohibition (as it is internalized by Charles and reproduced as the social configuration of Sulaco), in that it perpetually augments the desire associated with the mine’s production (e.g., the value of its shares) and appropriates that excess desire to itself as an ever-increasing reservoir of authority. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this, and a compelling extension of the continuity between the ideological and the libidinal, is the threat posed to Gould’s marriage by his devotion to the mine as his “mistress.” While the mine flourishes, his marriage is reduced to a parody of courtly love, an almost purely formal affair. Gould is perpetually away

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from his home and his wife, as his relationship to the mine absorbs all his desire and devotion to such an extent that Decoud describes it as a “cold and overmastering passion, which [Emilia] dreads more than if it were an infatuation for another woman” (N, 245). The puritanical aspect of Gould’s “infidelity” finds expression in the gestures of courtly love that he directs toward his wife, which indicate an awareness of sublimated desire that draws its strength precisely from its prohibition. Thus, whenever Gould brings the silver down from the mountain, he passes beneath the balcony of the Casa Gould where Emilia stands waiting for a momentary glance from her husband, the knight errant of material interests (N, 115). Tellingly, this aspect of the Gould family romance—and the ideology it articulates—resonates in the behavior of Nostromo and Dr. Monygham as well, as Nostromo never gets beyond courtly love gestures toward Giselle, merely “pressing the hem of her skirt to his lips” (N, 542) in acknowledgment of his subjection to the buried treasure and Dr. Monygham conceals his passion for Emilia behind elaborately chivalric behaviors. Supplementing the backdrop of social organization, the narrative establishment of the Gould family romance as the driving force behind the emergent ideology of material interests in Sulaco sets in place the interrelationship between the psychic and the political as the central dynamic in Nostromo. The psychoanalytic category of the family romance helps us decipher this connection as it elucidates the dynamic by which Charles’s violation of his father’s prohibition cancels and preserves that prohibition and establishes the silver as the law of the land in the service not of the paternal function, but of the ideology of material interests. The result is a dialectical turn whereby the transgression of one level of the law feeds directly into that law’s reinforced establishment on a higher level, cementing the interdependence of the psychic and the social, the libidinal and the ideological, and setting the stage for the sustained consideration of this confluence, which is the tale of Nostromo’s career. In addition to his role as an enforcer of Imperial law, Nostromo also serves material interests by exemplifying the slave morality that underwrites and sustains their regime of control. Up until the night when he takes the silver offshore, Nostromo is the public exemplar and guarantor of a popular slave morality, reveling in the

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prestige that comes with his reputation as “incorruptible” (N, 127), but blind to the ideological work his performance of that identity accomplishes. In this regard, he is the archetypal ideological subject according to Althusser’s formulation: “[H]is ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.”7 The ritualistic dimension of Nostromo’s ideological situation comes through with remarkable vividness in the first half of the novel, during which he is presented with scarcely any interiority at all. His actions, described by limited third-person narrators, are most often those witnessed by the Sulacan public in strikingly ritualistic terms. An exemplary instance of Nostromo’s ritualistic performance of his subjection to the regime of control, and one of the defining episodes of his public life, is his encounter with the local girl Paquita. Riding through the town on one of its feast days, Nostromo meets a crowd of dancers issuing from a dance hall. He is forced to pull up his horse just as a “red flower, flung with a good aim from somewhere in the crowd, struck [him] on the cheek” (N, 127). Suddenly drawn into the center of the crowd’s attention by the approach of “a pretty Morenita,” Nostromo finds himself virtually on stage, performing a set piece in the festival proceedings: “A wide circle formed round the generous, the terrible, the inconstant Capataz de Cargadores” (N, 128). Paquita demands to know why Nostromo pretends not to see her when she passes by; Nostromo replies that he does not love her anymore, and she begins to cry, whereupon he changes his tune to satisfy not only Paquita, but his audience as well: “I love thee as much as ever.” “Is that true?” she cooed, joyously, her cheeks still wet with tears. “It is true.” “True on thy life?” “As true as that; but thou must not ask me to swear it on the Madonna that stands in thy room.” And the Capataz laughed a little in response to the grins of the crowd. She pouted—very pretty—a little uneasy. (N, 128) 7. Althusser, “Ideology,” 158.

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When Nostromo concludes the encounter by allowing Paquita to cut the silver buttons off his jacket, he satisfies several requirements at once: the audience is thrilled, Paquita is appeased, and his reputation is preserved. I would like to suggest that Conrad draws our attention to the ritual elements of Nostromo and Paquita’s encounter in order to emphasize Nostromo’s performance of his subject position in this socially important and conventionalized setting. Nostromo’s intuitive exploitation of a potentially embarrassing scene operates in the novel as a clear indication of what I have called his slave morality, and of the extent to which his consciousness is produced by the regime that morality sustains. Here, the “material rituals” of Nostromo’s exchange with Paquita are clearly “defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive [his] ideas.” Faced with a public affront to his reputation for generosity, Nostromo rises above Paquita’s challenge and translates his silver buttons into prestige and admiration. He meets Paquita’s demand by forfeiting his only items of value, publicly exemplifying the slave morality that keeps the people of Sulaco satisfied in their poverty while the material interests get rich. The people in the crowd are enormously pleased with his actions, and even the narrator takes part in characterizing him as “the lordly Capataz de Cargadores, the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo” (N, 130). For the people of Sulaco, episodes like this translate Nostromo’s poverty and generosity into guarantees of his moral standing; in fact, his exemplification and valorization of a slave morality facilitates and naturalizes the contradictory logic of material interests. So long as “he remain[s] rich in glory and reputation” (N, 415) he is ready to reject the temptations of precisely the commodity he helps produce, even as he endures poverty and penury. One of the chief effects of Nostromo’s exemplification of the values that both validate the millenary faith of the Sulaco populace and sustain the Imperial machine of material interests is his nickname itself. The chief engineer tells us, apropos of Gould’s nickname “El Rey de Sulaco,” that “a nickname may be the best record of a success . . . putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth” (N, 316). This statement applies all the more to Nostromo, whose nickname, though it may have “the face of a joke,” nonetheless marks

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the “truth” that Nostromo is anything but “the lost subject”8 of the novel. Properly named Gian’ Battista Fidanza, Nostromo is also frequently referred to as “Capataz,” “Capataz de Cargadores,” and “your worship,” not to mention the narrator’s use of such impersonal terms as “the horseman” and “the rider.” Even within his foster family Nostromo goes by a variety of names that indicate his status as a signifier personalized and determined by its immediate relationship to other signifiers: Linda and Teresa Viola use the diminutive “Battistino” to refer to him at times, Giorgio calls him Giovann’ Battista, and Giselle calls him simply “Giovanni.” His most frequent and defining appellation, however, is “Nostromo,” a corruption of the Italian words nostro uomo, which mean “our man.” This etymology points to the central issue concerning his nickname: just as the principle of “one of us” in Lord Jim is dependent on who “us” is, so “Nostromo” is dependent on who is designated by the “Nost-” part of the word. That is, a substantial part of deciphering the significance of Nostromo’s nickname is figuring out who, precisely, “our” is and whether that designation has any useful stability. Two options immediately present themselves: either he is the man of the general populace, the representative of the people of Sulaco, or he is the man of the O.S.N. Company, the factotum of the material interests that govern Sulaco. In support of the first option, the strongest evidence that “Nostromo” refers to Gian’ Battista’s membership in and patronage of the people of the town comes from the “Author’s Note” to Nostromo: “[H]e is a Man of the People” (N, xi). Backing up this unequivocal pronouncement is the Italian origin of the nickname, suggesting a connection to Giorgio Viola’s tradition of revolutionary championing of “the People” and to Nostromo’s position as the adoptive son of the old Garibaldino. However, any attempt to read “Nostromo” as an indicator of Gian’ Battista’s affiliation with the people of Sulaco founders on the fact that he belongs body and soul to the material interests he serves. Captain Mitchell persistently refers to Nostromo as a possession of the O.S.N. Company, gradually developing a “mania for ‘lending you my Capataz de Cargadores’” (N, 44). In fact, the details 8. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, 204.

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of the narrative, and the extent to which we have already seen Nostromo devote himself to his profession in the performance of both his (more or less) official duties and his “private” life point strongly toward the conclusion that his nickname exemplifies not a position of republican defiance (like that of Giorgio) but a capitulation to slave morality. Though there is no evidence that Nostromo received his nickname on board ship (it appears instead to be derived from his role on shore), the fact that “Nostromo” is Italian for “bosun” indicates a continuity between his status and that of Jim under the law of material interests as it is articulated through the ideological mask of duty. As a marker of Gian’ Battista’s biopolitical production by the Imperial principles of material interests, the “Nostromo” interpellation functions as the O.S.N. Company’s best mode of controlling him, tying his identity to his job and enforcing a morality of renunciation as fundamental to the performance of duty. As Benita Parry puts it, his nickname “functions as a metonym for an ethos that, by consecrating the private ownership of property, legitimizes the concept of the person as a possession.”9 In this sense, Gian’ Battista’s construction and performance of “Nostromo” as his persona indicates a radical displacement of identity that replays on an exaggerated scale the drama of fissuring and loss that Lacan says characterizes the infant’s first situation in the symbolic order. In his public manifestation, “Nostromo” becomes little more than a nodal point in that biopolitical order, a signifier that signifies for other signifiers—that is, he is a function of the operation of signification in its ideological configuration. Nostromo himself seems to be obliquely aware of this fundamental void at the heart of his purely public (and therefore purely context-dependent) identity, as indicated by his incessant motion. His perpetual activity functions as an outward manifestation of the psychic truth that haunts him, forever crying “Avanti!” in his ear when he is threatened with the prospect of introspection. Teresa picks up on this aspect of Nostromo’s character during their last encounter before he leaves Sulaco with the silver and she dies. Pausing from the flurry of activity preceding his departure, Nostromo visits Teresa on her deathbed, where she pronounces a diagnosis of his true status and a prescription for escaping it: 9. Parry, Conrad and Imperialism, 102–3.

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“You never change, indeed,” she said, bitterly. “Always thinking of yourself and taking your pay out in the fine words from those who care nothing for you.” . . . [H]e seemed to her to be an absurd spendthrift of these qualities which made him so valuable. He got too little for them. He scattered them with both hands amongst too many people, she thought. He laid no money by. She railed at his poverty, his exploits, his adventures, his loves and his reputation. . . . ”[D]o you look to it, man, that you get something for yourself out of it, besides the remorse that shall overtake you some day.” She laughed feebly. “Get riches at least for once, you indispensable, admired Gian’ Battista, to whom the peace of a dying woman is less than the praise of people who have given you a silly name—and nothing besides—in exchange for your soul and body. . . . They have turned your head with their praises,” gasped the sick woman. “They have been paying you with words.” (N, 254–57)

Emphasizing her point by forcing Nostromo to choose between fetching her a priest (honoring her residually religious slave morality) and doing his duty to the O.S.N. Company (honoring his emergent secular slave morality), Teresa exposes to him the spuriousness of his devotion, laying the groundwork for his attempt to transcend slave morality and to assume a status of master morality. She links his nickname to his subject position and function and points out the basic economics of his slave morality, emphasizing the disparity between the “words” with which he is paid and the riches he helps to produce. At last, assuming that Nostromo’s “soul and body” are a foregone part of the bargain he has struck with the powers that be, Teresa tells him not to flee the deal but to take it to its Faustian conclusion by obtaining “riches” as compensation. Taken aback by Teresa’s invective, Nostromo can only repeat Giorgio’s aphorism that “a good name . . . is a treasure” (N, 257), inadvertently proving the truth of Teresa’s diagnosis by revealing the kind of literal-minded equivalence with which he organizes his moral and ideological world. And while Teresa’s assault does not have an immediate effect on Nostromo’s subjective orientation (he still goes off with the silver and makes the ride to Cayta to fetch reinforcements), it lays the groundwork for his eventual abandonment of his slave morality and attempt to accede to a position of mastery. The point at which Nostromo makes this decisive move comes during his hapless attempt to take the lighterful of silver offshore. Stuck in the Gulf for more than six hours, Nostromo and Decoud have ample time to evaluate their lives. Decoud discovers the

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vapidity of his existence, setting in motion a collapse of his subjectivity that ends with his suicide. Nostromo’s experience is somewhat more involved, but no less devastating. Faced with the impossibility of getting the silver out into the shipping lane before daybreak (especially after the lighter is rammed by Sotillo’s ship), Nostromo is forced into a contemplative immobility that neutralizes his strategy of avoidance-through-ceaseless-activity. In this situation the cumulative force of Teresa’s words and Nostromo’s own misgivings about his value to his employers work together to crumble his position of slave morality. Here, for the first time in the novel, we gain some insight into Nostromo’s thoughts, witnessing his distrust of the task he has been given and his resentment of the agents of material interests who have seen fit to place the silver’s safety over his own: It was more dangerous, Nostromo said, with a laugh and a curse, than sending a man to get the treasure that people said was guarded by devils and ghosts in the deep ravines of Azuera. . . . ”But I cannot believe,” said Nostromo, “that its loss would have impoverished Don Carlos Gould very much. There is more wealth in the mountain. . . . And yet, [since] the day before yesterday, we have been fighting to save it from the mob, and to-night I am sent out with it into this darkness, where there is no wind to get away with; as if it were the last lot of silver on earth to get bread for the hungry with.” (N, 263–65)

Recognizing the unreasonable excess of Gould’s desire to salvage even the smallest portion of the mine’s total output, Nostromo begins to realize the discrepancy between the insatiability of capitalist desire (as encoded in the law of the land and the institutions of the town) and the enforced renunciation and deferral of even the most basic desires on the part of the populace. Sitting on top of the most coveted object of desire in the entire country and struck by its incommensurability to the quantity and quality of desire projected onto it, Nostromo experiences the first inklings of an ideological awareness that will lead him to acknowledge the hollowness of his slavish subjectivity. However, the momentum of his lifelong subjectivation carries Nostromo far enough to see the silver safely stored on the Great Isabel. Only when he returns to the mainland of Costaguana and

Our Man in Sulaco 137 lapses into a long sleep in the ruined fort does Nostromo experience an immobility complete enough to reverse his ideological position and reorient his subjectivity toward a master morality. The significance of Nostromo’s sleep as a radical shift in his consciousness and in the narrative direction of the novel appears in the sweeping description of his awakening: At last the conflagration of sea and sky, lying embraced and still in a flaming contact upon the edge of the world, went out. The red sparks in the water vanished together with the stains of blood in the black mantle draping the sombre head of the Placid Gulf; a sudden breeze sprang up and died out after rustling heavily the growth of bushes on the ruined earthwork of the fort. Nostromo woke up from a fourteen hours’ sleep. (N, 411)

This passage combines Christian imagery of the apocalypse and resurrection with pagan iconography of the phoenix rising from the ashes to give Nostromo’s awakening mythic resonance. Starting from a vision of global conflagration, the narrative perspective moves through a sinister personification of the Placid Gulf to the redemptive image of a life-giving wind, piling up significance before it settles on Nostromo, the elemental figure rising from the ruins of a shattered fort. The activity of the natural world further compounds this effect, paralleling the mobility of the perspective and ceasing when the perspective comes to rest. This emphatic return to consciousness picks up the narrative thread linking Nostromo’s developing consciousness to images of death (Teresa’s deathbed prophecy, the comparisons of the stillness of the gulf to “death” and “eternal peace” [N, 262]) to cast his return to Sulaco in the powerful images of a symbolic death and rebirth. Of his sleep we are told that “he lay as if dead . . . as still as a corpse,” such that a vulture alights near his prone form to watch “for the signs of death and corruption” (N, 413). So strong is the sense that Nostromo has either passed close to death or else been resurrected from a deathlike state that even he feels compelled upon rising repeatedly to insist: “I am not dead yet” (N, 413, 433). Extending this repudiation of death to its furthest possible contrary, the narrative situates Nostromo’s awakening as a rebirth, not just of the man himself, but of an entire species consciousness that

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evolves in a highly compressed form: “[W]ith the lost air of a man just born into the world, . . . he threw back his head, flung his arms open, and stretched himself with a slow twist of the waist and a leisurely growling yawn of white teeth, as natural and free from evil in the moment of waking as a magnificent and unconscious wild beast. Then, in the suddenly steadied glance fixed upon nothing from under a thoughtful frown, appeared the man” (N, 412). Nostromo’s assumption of the splayed posture of Christ on the cross, followed by his “moment of waking” in an animalistic state of innocence that is “free from evil” because it is beyond both good and evil, reverses the routine trajectory of slave morality. Rather than throwing off his amoral “unconscious” wildness by discovering the rewards of selfsacrifice, Nostromo welcomes the free naturalness of his desire. Only after he has regressed from the socialized position of his slave morality to a primal animalistic consciousness does he take on human characteristics, directing a “thoughtful” and perplexed glance at “nothing.” This “nothing” points to the reconfiguration of subjectivity that characterizes Nostromo’s abandonment of slave morality. Hitherto existing as the “nothing” signified by “Nostromo” and determined by external constructions of that name, Nostromo now finds that the world itself is vitiated by a perplexing “nothing.” The “thoughtful” character of this discovery also suggests a parallel discovery of the absence at the core of his subjectivity. This suggestion gathers force shortly after Nostromo’s awakening, when he twice declares to Dr. Monygham, “I am nothing” (N, 454, 457). Seeing both the world around him and his own existence as permeated with gaps, perplexing spaces of nothing, Nostromo becomes a fully modern, proto-Imperial subject. With this reconfiguration, Nostromo steps out of the spurious social role he has occupied (as merely a structural feature of the emergent Imperial order) and determines to take charge of his destiny, supplementing his earlier ethic of action with the calculation of ideological consciousness in a concerted effort to “gain a sense of mastery over the Fates” (N, 66). Shortly after he wakes up and realizes the extent of his predicament in “the necessity of living concealed” (N, 414), Nostromo articulates to himself the reality to which investment in a purely public identity has delivered him now that public recognition is lost to him: “He remained rich in glory and reputation. But since it was

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no longer possible for him to parade the streets of town, and be hailed with respect in the usual haunts of his leisure, the sailor felt himself destitute indeed” (N, 415). Deprived of the public dimension of his identity as “Nostromo,” he becomes aware of the void which that construction masks. This realization feeds into the narrative’s designation of Nostromo simply as “the sailor,” emphasizing the collapse of his identity with the loss of public support for that identity and reducing him to the status he had when he first came ashore in Sulaco and before he became the Capataz de Cargadores. As a moment in the evolution of Nostromo’s subjectivity, this transition also marks a decisive shift as Nostromo discovers both the heightened awareness of his new subjective orientation and its cost as well. Rather than simply taking as obvious and natural the ideological situation in which he finds himself, Nostromo discovers that he is capable of discerning between his own interests and the material interests he has served. This loss of innocence, with its attendant awareness of the complexity of symbolic ordering, quickly leads Nostromo to a much more nuanced understanding of the role he has played in the establishment of material interests in Sulaco, generating anger and resentment at his easy subjection to its ideology of ameliorative industry: “What he had heard Giorgio Viola say once was very true. Kings, ministers, aristocrats, the rich in general, kept the people in poverty and subjection; they kept them as they kept dogs, to fight and hunt for their service” (N, 415). Nostromo’s sudden understanding of Viola’s rage against the moneyed elite marks a wider, more overtly ideological element of his burgeoning consciousness. Viola’s critique of kings is easily extended to Charles Gould, whose nickname “El Rey de Sulaco” uncannily echoes the “rey-zamuro”— or vulture—Nostromo chases away when he first awakes (N, 413). The alignment of Gould’s interests with those of the Blanco party, the political representatives of the old aristocracy left over from the time of Spanish colonization, only reinforces the relevance of Viola’s terms in the decidedly capitalist atmosphere of modern-day Sulaco, and points toward the more subtle retention of much older ideological structures as the divine right of kings becomes the secular power of the magnate. Nostromo’s awareness of the overall shape of the biopolitical

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order in which he has been working and which has shaped his subjectivity as the public figure of “Nostromo” soon returns to the specificity of his own situation as a voided structural effect of this order: Everybody had given up. Even Don Carlos had given up. The hurried removal of the treasure out to sea meant nothing else than that. The Capataz de Cargadores, on a revulsion of subjectiveness, exasperated almost to insanity, beheld all this world without faith and courage. He had been betrayed! . . . . . . The word had fixed itself tenaciously in his intelligence. His imagination had seized upon the clear and simple notion of betrayal to account for the dazed feeling of enlightenment as to being done for, of having inadvertently gone out of his existence on an issue in which his personality had not been taken into account. (N, 417–18, 419–20)

Driven almost to insanity by the newly acquired consciousness of his position, his “subjectiveness,” Nostromo experiences a moment in which his own despair is reflected in a vision of the world itself such that both he and all creation are “without faith and courage.” Likewise, this experience of subjective destitution (finally recognized as a constitutive feature not only of consciousness, but also of all that consciousness is conscious of) is concentrated in the word betrayed, which assumes the status of an entrope, a linguistic fetish directly opposed to the point de capiton. Whereas the point de capiton represents the illusion of inherent and full meaning, the entrope exposes the death drive inhering in all signification. As such, the word signifies for Nostromo his awareness of the void at the heart of both the value system by which he has defined himself and the persona he has constructed around that system: “A man betrayed is a man destroyed!” (N, 420). Walter Allen identifies this sentiment as an informing feature of Conrad’s ethos: “ ’We are betrayed,’ Conrad could have said with Meredith, ‘by what is false within.’ ”10 This narrowly psychological reading stops short, however, by failing to account for the simultaneous betrayal of the subject by what is 10. Walter Allen, The English Novel: From The Pilgrim’s Progress to Sons and Lovers, 307. On the “entrope,” see Michael Mageean, “The Secret Agent’s (T)extimacies: A Traumatic Reading beyond Rhetoric,” 251–54.

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without (i.e., external ideological conditions). Nostromo’s sense of “having inadvertently gone out of his existence” by undertaking the task of removing the silver indicates his consequential awareness that his existence as “Nostromo” has ceased with his failure to perform exactly as he was expected. Finally, this entire process of realization is cast as an “enlightenment,” an accession to the realm of instrumental reason that, ironically, is necessary if Nostromo is to understand his own exploitation by that practice of instrumental reason in organizing the world, and that positions his subjective development as a moment in the overall development of subjectivity under Empire. In this highly personal “dialectic of enlightenment,” the fragility of Nostromo’s subjectivity becomes the occasion for his suspicion of the biopolitical order that produces it. In turn, he uses the insight he gains to enhance his understanding of his own subjectivity. Nostromo experiences this dialectic as a vanishing reality in terms that recall Althusser’s materialist formulation of ideology: “The magnificent Capataz de Cargadores [found himself] deprived of certain simple realities, such as the admiration of women, the adulation of men, the admired publicity of his life” (N, 420). These “realities” of which Nostromo finds himself deprived by his disavowal of his public persona coincide with Althusser’s definition of ideology insofar as they are the concrete manifestations of the imaginary relations a subject has to the real relations of production. Reversing the poles of his ideological situation, Nostromo assumes that if his slave morality was spurious, then its opposite must be true; he abandons the ethic of prestige and reputation for one of material accumulation, summed up by his belief that “everything is permitted to the rich” (N, 435). Determining to play the game of material interests according to the rules he believes he has discovered, Nostromo consciously reconfigures his desire away from its public suspension as the key to his reputation and toward its private satiation in his project to “grow rich very slowly” (N, 503). Though this decision is separated from the drama of his awakening consciousness by some ninety pages, it is of a piece with that drama as it completes Nostromo’s reorientation in the biopolitical order of Sulaco and brings about the reconfiguration of his subjectivity. Nostromo internalizes the situational irony of his earlier existence

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as the factotum of material interests, making that irony an integral part of his subjectivity as he abandons his devoted service to the O.S.N. Company and starts up a trading company to facilitate his laundering of the stolen silver. This occupational shift is simply an externalization of the disjunction between rhetoric and motives that Nostromo perceives to be the sustaining dynamic of the world according to material interests, a world in which one is either a dissembling “have” or an exploited “have-not.” Nostromo adopts an individualist ethic that sees antagonism between subjects (i.e., free competition for profit) as natural and obvious, just as he previously saw the principles of slave morality as natural and obvious. Though the process here is much less decisive and clear than that in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, its tendency is the same, as Nostromo’s motivation by the notion that “everything is permitted to the rich” (N, 435) resonates with Kurtz’s and Jim’s autocratic impulses. Conceiving the project as a self-refashioning, Nostromo abandons the illusory public construction of “Nostromo” and tries to master the process of subjectivation by making “for himself, under his rightful name, another public existence, but modified by the new conditions” (N, 527). Whereas Kurtz did this by becoming a warlord and Jim by taking over Patusan, Nostromo makes material wealth the aim of his desire. He determines to replace the fantasy structure of “Nostromo” with the materialist fantasy structure of Empire (i.e., by situating himself as a function of various commoditybased discourses). This determination lays bare the interdependence of subjective méconnaissance and ideological misrecognition, exposing the workings of ideology as an imaginary construction whose only defining feature is its own reproduction in further imaginary constructions. Nostromo’s decision to master desire by “grow[ing] rich very slowly” is thus characterized by the misrecognition of “rich” as an endpoint at which one can arrive and of himself as the potential master of that richness by virtue of his selfrestrained access to the treasure. The tension produced by this attempt to remain focused on the one-track project of making his fortune, of mastering the treasure without giving way to the knowledge that the only way to do so is to become its subject, manifests itself in restless activity and prudence: “Nostromo had been growing rich very slowly. It was an ef-

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fect of his prudence. He could command himself even when thrown off his balance. And to become the slave of a treasure with full selfknowledge is an occurrence rare and mentally disturbing. . . . He did not dare stay too long in port. When his coaster was unloaded, he hurried away on another trip, for he feared arousing suspicion even by a day’s delay” (N, 523). Prudent almost to a fault, Nostromo sublimates into ceaseless commercial activity the excess desire generated and suspended by his careful and slow enrichment. Faced with the necessity of deferring his desire for full possession of the treasure if he is to remain beyond suspicion, Nostromo channels the surplus into restless activity just as he had earlier done in his refusal to recognize his slavish status with regard to the material interests he served; the direction of his activity has changed, but the cry “Avanti!” still rings in his ears. Literally acting out the chain of deferral and suspended gratification that his illicit behavior and guilty conscience demand, Nostromo never stays in port long enough to conduct his personal relationships, and never stays anywhere long enough to enjoy the wealth he accumulates. Nostromo’s presumed mastery over the regime of control that commands suspension of desire is captured not only in his use of the trading concern as a front for laundering the stolen silver, but also in the nature of his aboveboard ventures. At the beginning of the novel’s final movement, we find Nostromo in particularly good spirits upon returning from one expedition because he has “made a great profit” on a “cargo of salt fish” that was in high demand because “Lent was approaching” (N, 527). This is the only information ever presented regarding Nostromo’s legitimate trading ventures, and it reveals a cynical manipulation of others’ slave morality that surpasses even the sojourn beyond good and evil of his illicit operations. Evoking the Patna captain’s cynical attitude toward his “cargo” of pilgrims, Nostromo’s activity here plugs directly into the Nietzschean delimitation of master and slave morality as he capitalizes on Christianity’s institutionalized rituals of slave morality at the time of year when renunciation of desire is a metaphysical imperative for Catholics. This is the high point of Nostromo’s attempted accession to master morality, establishing him as a masterly manipulator who has seen through the false consciousness of slave morality, mastered its conditions of righteous self-denial, and made

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others’ adherence to it an occasion for his own gratification (i.e., profit). Despite his apparent mastery, however, Nostromo’s persisting subjection to the new Imperial regime of control shows through when he discovers the construction of a lighthouse on the Great Isabel, scarcely four hundred yards from where his silver lies buried (N, 526). Thinking “with the resolution of a master and the cunning of a cowed slave” and summoning up “a corrupt courage” (N, 528, 526), Nostromo uses his influence with Captain Mitchell to get Giorgio Viola nominated as lighthouse keeper, an “expedient” (529) that reveals his newly utilitarian guiding principle. Trading on what is left of his good reputation, Nostromo makes Giorgio a means to an end, trusting to the unassailable authority of private property (Captain Mitchell defends his unilateral appointment of Giorgio by pointing out that “[t]he light is private property . . . it belongs to my Company” [N, 530]) to maintain his position of mastery. “With a sense of having mastered the fates” by this expedient (N, 530), Nostromo pursues the second part of his plan to master the situation by exploiting the domestic/libidinal register he has established as an enabling parallel to the ideological/moral register. He continues his utilitarian management of his surrogate family (in a manner that recalls Gentleman Brown’s cynical manipulation of his men and Jim) by seeking the hand of one of the Viola daughters so that his frequent visits to the island will not arouse suspicion. Faced with finally making the decision that has characterized much of his relationship to the Viola family since his arrival in Sulaco (we are told that Teresa maintained until her death that Nostromo would eventually become “husband to one and brother to the other” of the girls, and Nostromo himself tells Giorgio that he is “fated” to have his wife from Giorgio’s household [N, 524]), Nostromo weighs the relative merits of Giselle and Linda against his requirements. He settles on Giselle because her “mysteriousness,” “surface placidity,” and pliability (N, 524–25) appeal to his need for secrecy and manageability, whereas Linda’s severe integrity, her pedigree as “a chip of the old block, true daughter of the austere republican” (N, 524), poses a distinct threat to his ongoing illicit project. When the moment comes, however, Nostromo balks at naming Giselle and tells Giorgio only that he has come to ask for his “wife”

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(N, 531). This failure of nerve further complicates the parallels between Nostromo’s relationship with the Viola family and his tenuous sense of mastery over the treasure and, by extension, the biopolitical order it represents. Giorgio responds to Nostromo’s request by calling for Linda, exacerbating Nostromo’s fear of being banned from the island; he is unwilling to contradict Giorgio and he goes through with the engagement. This misunderstanding places Nostromo in a precarious position, as he discovers a further need for secrecy in his life, compounding his utilitarian approach to Giorgio by using Linda not only to gain access to the silver, but also to Giselle. Faced with two secrets that he must sustain if he is to continue his pursuit of wealth and mastery, Nostromo is thus obliged to do quadruple duty on his regular visits to the island (ostensibly courting Linda and maintaining his public position as a successful businessman while illicitly courting Giselle and collecting his silver). Moreover, he is forced to abandon an element of his prudence by stepping up his trips to the island due to the increased necessity of removing all the silver before it is discovered by the inhabitants of the new lighthouse. Even Nostromo’s masterful stroke of having his friends installed as keepers of the lighthouse is but an effective deflection of, rather than a solution to, his problem. As such, his activity accelerates and compounds as the ideological/ moral and domestic/libidinal registers become ever more imbricated with one another and Nostromo’s complicated deflections, deferrals, and sublimations of desire cross more and more en route to a collision that will bring the entire enterprise, and the subjectivity it produces, crashing down. Overcome by his desire for Giselle on one of his visits to the island, Nostromo tells her of the treasure and promises to spend it on her once he recovers it all. He believes, in “the supreme intoxication of his generosity,” that his love for her will grant him mastery over the treasure and thus freedom from that part of him which remains subject to its demands. Conrad writes: “[H]e flung the mastered treasure superbly at her feet. . . . He got up from his knees reeling, weak, empty, as though he had flung his soul away” (N, 541). The repetition of “flung” within a few lines syntactically (and thus by implication semantically) equates the treasure to Nostromo’s soul. Believing himself to have mastered and freed himself from the

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treasure, Nostromo also believes that he has mastered and freed himself from his soul, of the transgression that, “entering upon a man’s existence, eats it up like a malignant growth, consumes it like a fever” (N, 523). Giselle senses Nostromo’s sense of liberation and mastery, and reinforces it by calling him “my lover, my master” (N, 541). This, following Nostromo’s own sense of having “mastered” the treasure, also cements her identification with the treasure even as it evokes the Hegelian model of master/slave relations that turns on recognition of the master as such by the slave. Having faced and overcome the twin threats of the lighthouse on the Great Isabel and his erroneous betrothal to Linda, Nostromo seems to have found a way to true mastery, at once subjugating Giselle and the treasure. At this point, the narrative seems set to move to a (Nietzschean) utopian conclusion as Nostromo develops a plan to retrieve the silver even more quickly than before so that he and Giselle can run off together to live happily ever after (she the “jewel in a casket” replacing the silver in Nostromo’s imaginary), “far away in a white palace upon a hill above a blue sea” (N, 541). As with each of Nostromo’s previous senses of himself as having mastered his situation, however, this fantasy crumbles almost immediately as Giselle belies her “slave” identification by demanding to know the whereabouts of the treasure. Nostromo’s sense of mastery shatters with her demand, as he is “thunderstruck” to discover that he is as much in thrall to the silver as ever. “Appalled” at the vehemence with which the “spell” of the treasure returns to him at this moment, Nostromo forbids Giselle to ask him about it as he realizes that “he had not regained his freedom.” Far from having flung his soul away, Nostromo finds it still returns to haunt him, even as it “die[s] within him” each time he envisions himself “creeping” through the ravine to retrieve the silver. No longer even imagining himself as a master, Nostromo now recognizes his ongoing recovery of the treasure as the “work of a craven slave” (N, 542). Making matters worse, Nostromo finds that his love for Giselle, far from liberating him from his slavery to the silver, makes him even more of a slave than he had been before. He weakly submits to her demand that he come to her at the window of Giorgio’s house after retrieving a load of silver: “Her form drooped consolingly

Our Man in Sulaco 147 over the low casement towards the slave of the unlawful treasure. The light in the room went out, and weighted with silver, the magnificent Capataz clasped her round her white neck in the darkness of the gulf as a drowning man clutches at a straw” (N, 544–45). The longer he perpetrates the dual deception of mastery as a successful businessman and betrothed of Linda, the more strongly he characterizes himself as a “thief” (N, 540, 544) and a “slave” (542, 546) to his “two masters” (547). The grasp for mastery characterized by his decision to grow rich only reproduces the slavish subjection to the Imperial order (grounded in the stolen San Tomé silver) that he had sought to overcome. Nostromo’s dual deceptions and dual subjections come together in the novel’s climax, as the value system he eschews for its spuriousness as the enabling morality of material interests returns to confound him once and for all. Skulking around the island one night in quest of more illicit silver, Nostromo is shot by Giorgio, who believes he is defending Giselle’s honor against the designs of her suitor, Ramírez. This point of the plot is relatively simple, but it carries enormous significance for our ideological and psychological reading. In this context, Giorgio’s shot performs double duty. First, it ironically defends the core values of the system against which Nostromo is in rebellion (honor, decency, honesty, self-sacrifice) as Giorgio, in a violent moment of mastery, kills the intruder he perceives as posing a threat to his fundamental principles. The second function of his shot, enforcing the law of material interests against those who would violate the rights of property and possession, gains credibility from the fact that Giorgio performs this narrative and ideological work unwittingly, in a state of confusion (thinking Nostromo is Ramírez) that never dissipates. Though defending the rights of the Gould Concession and the O.S.N. Company is no doubt far from Giorgio’s mind when he pulls the trigger (his antipathy toward such representatives of material interests plays an important role in Nostromo’s decision to steal the silver in the first place), he nevertheless serves as the deus ex machina of material interests in the novel. In the grand operatic finale, Linda’s despairing cry of “Nostromo” establishes “the genius of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores” as the presiding spirit of Sulaco (N, 566), displacing the gringo

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ghosts of the opening chapter not by writing over their vices, but by repeating and naturalizing those vices as deplorable but seemingly inescapable features of the cultural landscape of emergent Empire. This enshrinement of Nostromo’s genius as the characteristic spirit of emergent Empire in Sulaco merely reinforces the continuity between Nostromo’s personal experience and the cultural changes of incipient Empire. Indeed, this final vignette introduces a quasiallegorical statement on the reproductive power of the ideology of material interests. Just as Nostromo experiences a rebirth that allows him more fully to assimilate the functional logic of modernity after he awakes in the ruined fort, so Sulaco experiences “a second youth, like a new life” (N, 504) after the fall of Montero and the reestablishment of stability that encourages the flow of global capital into the area. Not faced with the same restrictions on getting rich as Nostromo is, Sulaco “outstrip[s] Nostromo’s prudence” (N, 504), opening the floodgates of material interests with all their attendant consequences: “Material changes swept along in the train of material interests. And other changes more subtle, outwardly unmarked, affected the minds and hearts of the workers” (N, 504). Just as Nostromo found his subjectivity produced by the exigencies of his role at the juncture of the emergent and the residual (religious, moral, political), so the people of Sulaco find themselves in a virtual allegory of historical materialism as their subjectivities are produced and reproduced by the material changes wrought by material interests. Nostromo’s wild oscillations from sweeping panorama to focused interiority come together in its final pages so that Conrad can show the fundamental continuity between the subjective and the ideological in a highly compressed yet widely relevant critique of Empire’s emergent order. The interconnectedness between the psychological and the political in Nostromo is both fundamental to any adequate reading and crucial to deciphering its critique of incipient Empire. Consistent with his general approach, Conrad insists in Nostromo on the plight of the individual faced with the paradoxical exigencies of Empire’s new world order. From his establishment of the “laboratory conditions”11 of Sulaco’s social organization around the paradoxical and 11. Allen, English Novel, 303.

Our Man in Sulaco 149 idealist notion of “material interests” represented by the Gould Concession and the O.S.N. Company, and the privatization of the law according to their lights, Nostromo appears as the central enabling and enforcing figure. Further, the novel’s early focus on the Gould Concession and its roots in the Gould family romance ties the psychic economy of interpersonal relations to the ideological field organized by material interests and symbolized by silver. This early connection establishes the precedent for reading the ideological through the psychological, and vice versa, which becomes so important to Conrad’s critique as the latter half of the novel increasingly focuses on Nostromo. As the nodal point around which the emergent social organization and law of Sulaco converge with Conrad’s preoccupation with the plight of the individual subject, Nostromo at last appears in his full dimensions as a vision of the Imperial subject who becomes aware of the arbitrariness of ideological/value systems, yet is unable to break free from them and is emphatically punished for attempting to transgress them.

4

 The Perfect Anarchist

Conrad’s engagement with incipient Empire grew increasingly complex after Nostromo with the appearance of The Secret Agent. The Secret Agent belongs in that group of stories, including “An Informer,” “An Anarchist,” and Under Western Eyes, in which the intensive dimension of Empire comes explicitly to the fore. In them we find the most explicit articulation of Conrad’s awareness of Empire as so deeply contradictory and antagonistic that it seems at times not only to tend toward, but actively to seek, its own disintegration. In all of these tales Conrad traces the interdependence of legality and illegality, bourgeois society and anarchism. Particularly in “An Anarchist” and Under Western Eyes, Conrad shows how Empire’s regimes of control can have the opposite of their intended effects, producing subjects who resist and rebel against it rather than facilitating and reproducing it. This is not to say that Conrad’s attitudes toward revolutionaries softened in the years following the publication of The Secret Agent, but it is telling that he continued, in tales like “An Informer” and “An Anarchist,” to show a close continuity between bourgeois culture and its nihilistic flip side and to examine the way in which the dominant culture’s techniques of biopolitical production create the very subjects it ostensibly wants to eradicate. What seems to be coming through in this group of works is an awareness of what Zˇ izˇek, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, calls “the immanent[ly] antagonistic character” of capitalist

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The Perfect Anarchist 151 culture.1 The Secret Agent provides the fullest treatment of this problematic, and thus lends itself best to sustained analysis; it provides adequate detail on personal histories and it colors in the background behind the individual dramas that predominate in the stories. The setting of The Secret Agent in London, one of the centers of imperialism’s waning global organization, heightens the emphasis on deterritorialization that characterizes the settings of the three previously discussed novels. Though the novel takes place in the metropolitan heart of the British empire, we find it peopled with Conrad’s by-now-familiar internationally inflected cast of characters: Vladimir (Russian), Sir Ethelred and Toodles (English), Karl Yundt and Chancelier d’Ambassade Wurmt (Germanic), Michaelis (whose name is either of Greek or Irish provenance), and Verloc and Winnie (French-English). Indeed, one could argue that the novel’s cosmopolitan world and the multinational cast of characters with which it is populated constitutes a decentering gesture by Conrad as he shows London’s imperialist centrality to be little more than an enabling fiction that belies the radically decentered reality of incipient Empire. This decentering move is supplemented by the focus on a small group of characters whose conflicts act out the tensions between and within legality and illegality that form one of the novel’s central concerns. In this vein the novel shows society women celebrating anarchists like Michaelis, who at once depends upon their support and longs “to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches” (SA, 29). These two groups are complemented by individuals like Winnie, Vladimir, and Chief Inspector Heat, all of whom comment on the events they witness, distilling and clarifying the novel’s main concerns. Thus the international quality of the characters involved in the action of The Secret Agent plays into the breadth of Conrad’s concern with incipient Empire, even as their small number facilitates his exploration of its impact upon individuals. As with Nostromo, The Secret Agent relies on a range of characters as vehicles for the various dimensions of its critique, so that we must turn to Vladimir for our analysis of the social organization in the novel, while Winnie forms the focal point of the family romance and the Professor plays out the conflict of slave morality. 1. Zˇ izˇek, Sublime Object, 128. See also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.

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The social organization of The Secret Agent is simultaneously more concrete and more abstract than that in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, or Nostromo. It is more concrete due in part to its immediacy for Conrad: the social organization is that of London in the 1890s. However, it is more abstract for the same reason, since Conrad’s attempt to pin down its contours is hampered by his active participation in it. Abandoning the device of metonymy by which he distances and simplifies ideological orders in the other novels, as well as the narrative techniques of frame narrators and spatiotemporal distance that facilitate them, Conrad transcends the reifying potential of such an approach and turns his scrutiny on incipient Empire as an immediate phenomenon for the majority of his (metropolitan) readers. Conrad explicitly provides the outline of this new approach as Vladimir, the first secretary of the embassy, assigns Verloc to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. When Vladimir asks Verloc to name “the fetish of the hour that all the bourgeoisie recognize” (SA, 30), he identifies the dominant ideological order as that of the dominant class and establishes the importance of discovering one of the points de capiton of that order if one hopes to disrupt its smooth functioning. Leading Verloc through the superseded signifiers of royalty and religion (the same signifiers left out of account in the mariners’ code that governs Lord Jim), Vladimir finally arrives at the reigning one: “The sacrosanct fetish of today is science. . . . Any imbecile that has got an income believes in that. He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow. It is the sacrosanct fetish. . . . They believe that in some mysterious way science is at the source of their material prosperity” (SA, 31, 33). Vladimir’s characterization of science takes secularization as its starting point even as it recognizes the quasi-religious status attained by the rise of Enlightenment rationality. In this regard, “science” stands in for the totalizing and mystifying reach of rationalization, as the ascendancy of instrumental reason only cancels the compulsive irrationality of religious belief in order to appropriate and preserve it. Thus prefiguring the Frankfurt School’s critique of the legacy of Enlightenment rationality as the new religion of capitalist culture, Vladimir establishes the ideological order of The Secret Agent as the tyranny of rationalism, summed up in the “mysterious way” in which science guarantees “material prosperity.”

The Perfect Anarchist 153 As the defining feature of the new cultural landscape, a metonym for the epistemological system that legitimates and validates rationalization of all aspects of life under Empire, science serves as the crucial point de capiton of the novel’s social organization. For the practical purposes of a violent disruption of this social organization, however, science is too general a category, so Vladimir almost immediately follows up his declaration that science is the “sacrosanct fetish” of the day by isolating its most transcendental manifestations as the focal points of its significance: “[N]ot every science will do. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy. Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics” (SA, 33). As the pinnacle of abstraction to which human rationality has been put, pure mathematics represents a logical manifestation of the human compulsion to believe in a higher order of truth and perfection which, though unattainable in the empirical world, is yet knowable by the human mind. Tempting though the prospect of exploding “pure mathematics” is, however, Vladimir recognizes that it is impossible, so he abandons it and introduces the idea of “having a go at astronomy” (SA, 34). He chooses astronomy because of its connection to a particular material site that grounds an entire epistemological system: the Greenwich Observatory. The observatory’s privileged status comes, of course, from its designation of the prime meridian. Marking the first of the repeated and intersecting circles by which first imperialism and then Empire divide the globe in the name of uniformity and efficiency, the prime meridian is the originary circle around the globe. Its establishment goes back to inquiries in mathematics and astronomy that anticipate Einsteinian relativity theory in their fusion of space and time. Spatially speaking, the prime meridian provides the first line on the basis of which a grid is laid over the surface of the earth, flattening out its relief and abstracting its particularities. Moreover, it establishes Greenwich (or, rather, London) as the center from which all spatial orientation proceeds, making every place on earth that is not London peripheral to some degree. By virtue of the spatial organization thus established, anyone with adequate knowledge of mathematics and astronomy can determine his or her location—relative to London—by way of a few simple observations. Likewise,

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the prime meridian actualizes the infiltration of instrumental reason into every nook of the globe, even if no representative of the imperial/Imperial West has ever been there. As the lexicon of degrees, minutes, and seconds associated with such rationalized organization indicates, this spatial configuration entails temporal organization as well. Indeed, though the Greenwich Observatory is certainly important for marking the spatial coordinate of the zero meridian, its prominence in the late-Victorian consciousness came from its association with Standard Time. Building on the prime meridian’s spatial preeminence, the establishment of Standard Time in 1884 divided up the earth into discrete time zones, each of which is identified by its temporal distance from the benchmark Standard Time of Greenwich/London. In addition to reinforcing the center/periphery paradigm of the prime meridian’s spatial configuration, the establishment of Standard Time meant a shift in people’s experiential relation to the world around them, as it replaced the local traditions of telling time by the height of the sun with a rationalized and mechanical standard. Indeed, the inefficiency of the older means of telling time was what led to the advent of Standard Time, as variant local times played havoc with train schedules and impeded the smooth distribution of goods as capitalism established itself across ever larger portions of the globe. As this indicates, the chief importance of both the prime meridian’s temporal and spatial (re)organization lay in its facilitation of the capitalist imperatives of efficient trade, rationalized production, and standardized schedules. From this perspective, the prime meridian naturalized the mechanisms of capitalism by ingraining the logic of science into the territories and subjects of imperialism-cum-Empire. These various associations help explain the powerful symbolism of an attack on the observatory, and show Vladimir’s plan to be more than simply an affront to science; it is also a strike at the heart of Empire’s ideological, economic, and epistemological organization. (On the level of what Jean-François Lyotard calls “narrative knowledge” and of Conrad’s distinctly modernist treatment, of course, the regime represented by the observatory is considerably less hegemonic, as building addresses fail to coincide with their physical locations [SA, 14–15] and individuals experience time in an elastic rather than mechanistic way.) Vladimir is not privy to this

The Perfect Anarchist 155 level of the novel’s irony, however, and his speech to Verloc gives eloquent expression to the rationalized aspect of the regime sustained by the prime meridian and the observatory. At the same time, it articulates the dialectical consciousness of the novel by using the rhetoric of capitalism to motivate Verloc: “I tell you plainly that you will have to earn your money. . . . No work, no pay,” and “When you cease to be useful you shall cease to be employed” (SA, 26, 28). Thus Vladimir uses capitalist rhetoric to motivate Verloc to act against the system which that rhetoric validates. In order to continue to be employed as a reified means to an end whose value lies exclusively in his usefulness, Verloc must produce results that have as their ostensible objective the dissolution of the very system that dictates the terms of his employment. Finally, lest we mistakenly read Vladimir’s characterization of the ideological regime as exclusive to England, Conrad takes care to establish its fundamentally deterritorialized status by consolidating much of the novel’s cosmopolitanism in this one episode. Vladimir’s entire presentation is governed by the elusiveness of his nationality. Perhaps most strikingly, he shifts from accent to accent and language to language in the course of his interview with Verloc. He sprinkles his speech with tag phrases in French, Latin, and English and swerves from “idiomatic English without the slightest trace of a foreign accent” (SA, 20) to “an amazingly guttural intonation not only utterly un-English, but absolutely un-European” (24), then back into French (25), “an amazingly genuine English accent” (35), and “guttural Central Asian tones” (36) before finishing up by changing “the note once more with an unprincipled versatility” (37). This linguistic and dialectic range indicates the deterritorialized position Vladimir represents. By virtue of his polymorphous nationality, the system he describes in these various voices takes on a decentered and rhizomatic character, becoming anchored to capitalist principles as he uses them to motivate the agent provocateur Verloc and retaining its rationalist bias as he speaks to Verloc all the while “as if delivering a scientific lecture” (SA, 30). Just as science and the Greenwich Observatory stand in for the hegemony of instrumental reason, so newspapers represent for Vladimir the chief means by which Imperial hegemony is consolidated. Vladimir recognizes that only by breaking through the platitudes of

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the official discourse articulated by the dailies can he hope to incite a crisis in the bourgeois culture for which the newspapers speak (and whose subjects they interpellate with a regularity dictated by none other than the movement of time as ordered into rational predictability by the science of astronomy). A concrete realization of the emergent culture of Empire, newspapers combine an aura of objectivity (achieved through a subjectless style that matches the objective pretensions of scientific writing) with the profit motive (the gathering, processing, and marketing of information as a commodity) to produce a daily affirmation of the rationalist credo. For Vladimir, the newspapers represent a virtually impenetrable shield for the truths of emergent Empire’s extensive and intensive operations; their interests are bound up with Empire’s basic assumptions and they wield the deflective power to defuse any threat to it. Of such traditional forms of anarchist attack as assassinations and bombings, Vladimir remarks that “Every newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away” (SA, 32). Their power narratively to assimilate any such crisis (as the culture of the merchant marine narratively assimilates the threat exposed by Jim’s dereliction of duty), to explain it away by reducing it to conventional formulation, is so extensive that Vladimir perceives and casts his project almost exclusively in terms of orchestrating an event that will find a crack in the dominant discourse. Thus recognizing the totalizing dimensions of the dominant class’s devotion to rationalism, Vladimir correctly determines that the only way a challenge to that order can be effective is if it appears on the scene as a manifestation of rationalism’s pure opposite: “A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest suspicion of any other object” (SA, 32). Again in the tone of “a scientific lecture,” Vladimir rigorously applies reason to the problem of how to break through the assimilative powers of rationalist hegemony, equating pure destructiveness with the irrationality of madness: “[W]hat is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad? Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes” (SA, 33).

The Perfect Anarchist 157 An interesting tension persists in Vladimir’s scheme, however, as the disparity between appearance (an unmotivated and insane attack on science) and reality (the politically motivated provocation of a reactionary response) articulates itself in the irreconcilability of irrationality and antirationality. Vladimir’s plan to introduce the ostensibly irrational onto the scene of emergent Empire is so well calculated that it might almost be an extension of the theory of negative dialectics into praxis via anarchist propaganda by deed. To be sure, this is the surface, apparent logic Vladimir hopes will be taken as the motivation behind the outrage. If the explosion is seen as such an attempt, as a step toward the “destruction of what is” en route to a wholly new order (i.e., if it is perceived as the first step in a dialectical movement), then it will have just the effect Vladimir hopes for: rather than inaugurating a dialectical cancellation of all that is, it will provoke a repressive response, a reifying knee-jerk reaction that will negate the outrage’s ostensible negative dialectical orientation. The tension between appearance and reality, irrationality and antirationality, then, harbors a canny negation of dialectics itself, advanced by a man who arguably has a dialectical consciousness but reifying aims. Rationally positing the “madness” of the “absurd” as the irrational par excellence in proposing an act of pseudo-antirationalism, Vladimir continues to develop his notion that for the outrage to be effective it must enter the official assimilative discourse of popular opinion (as dictated by the mass media) but remain unexplained by it—it must appear on the scene of public discourse, but always and only as pure irrationality. He positively thrills to the prospect that an assault on astronomy will exceed even the age-old standby explanation of class conflict: “I defy the ingenuity of journalists to persuade their public that any given member of the proletariat can have a personal grievance against astronomy. Starvation itself could hardly be dragged in there—eh?” (SA, 35). Vladimir’s proposal to blow up the observatory aims to shake the quasi-religious foundation of the rationalist worldview that naturalizes capitalist desire and advances Empire, exposing the perpetual state of crisis that structures and drives it. The explosion must, in effect, generate the discursive equivalent of the ideological symptom, simultaneously threatening the symbolic with disintegration

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by exceeding it and provoking a response of aggressive deflection and displacement as the symbolic tries to account for the antagonistic kernel presenced by the symptom. The unsymbolizable aspect of an assault on science is precisely what makes it effective, as it threatens to evacuate the entire symbolic order in the revelation that there are yet-unencountered aspects of the society that it orders with which it is not equipped to deal. Of course, for all the insight Vladimir displays in planning the outrage (and he has clearly thought it through at length), the plan fails, as did the historical attempt on which Conrad based his account. Likewise, the Professor, though wired up like a modern-day suicide bomber, never detonates his bomb. Even the explosion that does occur remains unnarrated so that not even a textual echo of the crisis it is meant to provoke disturbs the novel’s account of incipient Empire’s burgeoning hegemony. Taken together, these three nonevents signal the extent to which Conrad by this point considers the possibility of provoking a genuine crisis on the field of Empire all but impossible and all efforts to do so all but futile. They will be countered by a depicted explosion in Under Western Eyes as Conrad develops this perspective more fully, illustrating not only the ineffectiveness of revolutionary activity but its potential for injuring relatively innocent bystanders as well. Thus, instead of depicting a utopian or apocalyptic disruption to the emergent order of Empire, Conrad fleshes out Vladimir’s exposition with a representation of the law whose equivocality is even more pronounced than that of the corporatist law of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo. Whereas those novels introduce the equivocation of the law in terms of an outside perception at best articulated by the narrator but just as likely left to the interpretive devices of the reader, The Secret Agent overtly characterizes the law as dualistic and arbitrary. Ruminating on the certainties of his job, Chief Inspector Heat determines that there is as little difference between himself and the average thief as there is between any two workers in different areas of the cultural field: [H]e could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other’s meth-

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ods and of the routine of their respective trades. . . . Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same. . . . [T]he idea of thieving appeared to his instinct as normal as the idea of property. (SA, 92–93)

Heat’s meditation exposes the extent to which the totalitarian rationalization of life under capitalism extends to the division of labor among lawkeepers and lawbreakers, just as Razumov’s predicament in Under Western Eyes reveals the extent to which both autocrats and revolutionaries at times employ similar tactics in their disregard for individuals. In Heat’s perspective thieves are components of the social organization every bit as much as are policemen, representing not an internal threat to the integrity of the system, but an integral part of its functioning, an overt element that makes property valuable by posing a threat to its accumulation—though thieves may be vulnerable to discipline, they are already to a telling extent under the official regime’s control. As Conrad put it in a letter: “Man is a vicious animal. His viciousness must be organized. Crime is a necessary condition of organized existence. Society is essentially criminal—or it would not exist.”2 In blithely concrete terms (though without the moral judgment implied in Conrad’s formulation) Winnie extends the point to the naturalized unequal distribution of wealth under capitalism: “Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have.” . . . “What?” he asked at once, anxiously. “Not even if they were hungry? Mustn’t they?” The two had paused in their walk. “Not if they were ever so,” said Mrs. Verloc, with the equanimity of a person untroubled by the problem of the distribution of wealth. (SA, 173)

Far from being a “benevolent institution for the suppression of evil” (SA, 172) as her brother, Stevie, had supposed, the law is exposed by 2. Conrad to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, February 8, 1899, in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, 2:159 (my translation from the French).

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Winnie’s frank description as an institution not of justice in its ideal formulation, but of social organization and control. In the world of The Secret Agent, criminals are every bit as natural a product as property; they simply represent the obverse of the regime’s operation, the dangerous residue that is no less essential to the process of production than is the commodity, but which must be controlled as an embodiment of the “noxious” excess of the system. This connection between the law of capitalist culture and the discourse of science (in its concrete manifestation as technology) closes the circle of the social organization of The Secret Agent, not only making the principles of hegemonic rationalization the backdrop against which the plot takes place, but also activating their embodiment as one of its chief agents. Unable to propose throwing a bomb into pure mathematics because of its practical impossibility, Vladimir opens the door for a more physical science to stand as the metonymic signifier of the dominant social system of The Secret Agent. By positing science (particularly astronomy) as the “sacrosanct fetish” of the day, Vladimir identifies the terms of the social organization as those of a hegemonic rationalism. The subordination of the law to the imperatives of incipient Empire reinforces Vladimir’s insight, demonstrating the ability of capitalist modernity to hold legality and criminality not in tension, but as complementary features of the same system, as paired posts ordained by the division of labor. Finally, this vision of both rationality and the law as categories of proto-Imperial modernity circles back to the hegemonic rationalism with which Vladimir’s incisive (but incomplete) vision of the culture began as Conrad provides the impetus for reading through the novel’s fascination with science to discover the rationalized and mechanistic logic at work in the social organization itself. The Secret Agent’s companion novel, Under Western Eyes, engages with many of the same elements of social organization even as it moves away from the imperial center of London to the more peripheral spaces of St. Petersburg and Geneva. Of particular note with regard to The Secret Agent is the way in which Conrad develops the tension between the forces of order and those of revolution much more starkly. In the later novel, he pits the officials of the Russian autocracy against bona fide revolutionaries rather than the

The Perfect Anarchist 161 armchair anarchists of The Secret Agent. At the same time, he shows that the most dangerous individuals are those who are most convinced of their rectitude, that both autocracy and revolution can produce innocent victims, and that reason itself—especially when fetishized—has innate limits. The shift in setting enhances the expansiveness of Conrad’s vision as he shows many of the same foundationally Imperial forces already at work in a part of the world that would resist capitalism—and thus full-blown Empire—for nearly a century more. Present in Under Western Eyes, and echoing their treatment in The Secret Agent, are the predominant power of reason, the tendentially totalitarian social structures, the arbitrary nature of the law, and above all the impingement of economic and social forces upon the libidinal lives of individuals (as in the drastic reconfiguration of Razumov’s self-conception and ambitions after Haldin’s surprise visit). Especially the focus upon Razumov’s psychic life chimes with The Secret Agent and further emphasizes the importance to Conrad of the subjective, rather than the institutional or nation-statist, dimension of proto-Imperial modernity. Along these lines, Conrad’s vision of the totalitarian implications of proto-Imperial modernity in The Secret Agent does not stop with Vladimir’s speech and Heat’s professional duties; as Winnie’s comment about the role of the police and Stevie’s visible anxiety demonstrate, those implications permeate the psychic lives of the characters who move through it and face the pressures it exerts on the structures of subjectivity. Even more than in Heart of Darkness, the family romance of The Secret Agent deals directly with the impingement of economic forces on the psychic and libidinal lives of its subjects. Indeed, the domestic situation of the Verloc family underwrites all levels of The Secret Agent. The Assistant Commissioner tells Sir Ethelred that the entire case surrounding the outrage is a “domestic drama” (SA, 222), and in his “Author’s Note” to the novel Conrad himself twice refers to the story not as one of anarchist intrigue, but as that of Winnie’s life and death (xii, xv). The narrative bears out the proclaimed domestic focus of the tale, as Verloc’s relation to Stevie (already implicating Winnie as a mediator) appears in the novel’s opening sentence and leads directly to the incident that anchors the plot. As the domestic situation of the Verloc family collapses in the aftermath of that incident we are

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given a glimpse into Winnie’s past, a glimpse that helps to reveal the causal train that brought about Winnie’s present domestic circumstances. The chief element of this causal exploration is the detrimental impingement of the economic into the libidinal as a facilitating element of the novel’s plot and a crucial aspect of its critique of Empire. To begin with, the nontraditional configuration of the Verloc family establishes a complicated set of deflections and displacements of desire that play havoc with conventional conceptions of domestic roles. The putative husband and father, Verloc, conceives of himself only as a husband. He cares for Stevie not out of any genuine solicitude for him but only because Stevie is connected with Winnie (whom Verloc assumes loves him entirely “for his own sake” [SA, 252]). Similarly, Stevie understands himself as Winnie’s brother but occupies the domestic space of the son. His desire for Winnie’s love thus plays itself out as a deformed oedipal urge since his desire for the mother figure is thwarted by her status as his sister. As a result, it is redirected onto the surrogate father figure; Stevie’s desire to please Verloc is but a displacement of his desire to please Winnie. Winnie is the anchor of this odd triangulation of desire, as she constantly adjusts and reconfigures her desire in order to establish and sustain a maximally beneficial domestic situation. She thus channels her desire for Stevie’s welfare onto Verloc, soliciting his desire for her desire in order to deflect it onto Stevie in the form of Verloc’s ongoing willingness to support Stevie. She also solicits Stevie’s fraternal desire for her desire only to deflect it onto Verloc in the shape of a filial loyalty. The only genuine desires in this perverted dynamic are Verloc’s for Winnie (stimulated by her spurious reciprocation of his feelings and his “completely incorrigible” sense of self-satisfaction [SA, 251]) and Winnie’s for Stevie (which masquerades as her wifely desire for Verloc). More important than these genuine desires, however, are the blindnesses that sustain this configuration (Verloc’s blindness to the true direction of Winnie’s desire and Stevie’s blindness to the true status of Verloc’s desire) and the strict displacement and management of desire by which Winnie manages it. As one might expect, this situation can only obtain for so long, and Stevie’s death not only eliminates the reason for sustaining it but also the means by which it is sustained.

The Perfect Anarchist 163 The ensuing collapse results in a profoundly telling glimpse into Winnie’s psychic life as she recalls several crucial episodes from her life history. These episodes illuminate both her unwillingness to look too deeply into things and the intimate connection between libidinal and commercial economies under Empire’s emergent regime of control. As Verloc tries a variety of strategies to deal with Winnie’s paralysis upon learning of Stevie’s death, Winnie at last breaks her self-imposed injunction not to look into things and “review[s] the tenor of her life,” particularly as it has related to Stevie (SA, 241). This review takes us to the chronologically earliest scenes represented in the novel, scenes relating her childhood efforts to defend herself and Stevie from their raging father: She had the vision of the blows intercepted (often with her own head), of a door held desperately shut against a man’s rage (not for very long); of a poker flung once (not very far), which stilled that particular storm into the dumb and awful silence which follows a thunder-clap. And all these scenes of violence came and went accompanied by the unrefined noise of deep vociferations proceeding from a man wounded in his paternal pride, declaring himself obviously accursed since one of his kids was a “slobberin’ idjut and the other a wicked she-devil.” (SA, 242)

The parallel between Winnie’s early strategies of physical deflection (intercepting blows “with her own head”) and her later strategies of libidinal deflection points to the cumulative power of these visions as a primal scene in her life. Her protection of Stevie by placing herself between him and her father anticipates her mediating position in the Verloc family. The absence of her mother from these scenes appears to necessitate her intervention in the first place, anticipating her future performance of the roles of wife and mother in the Verloc household. Both of these elements feed into her utopian fantasy of self-effacement as she reconfigures Verloc and Stevie as “father and son” in a manner congenial enough that she can retire from the scene just as her own mother retired from the scenes of primal violence that make up Winnie’s psychic background. Whether the thrown poker that “stilled” the storm of her father’s assault killed him or merely chased him from the domestic scene (all we know for certain is that he is dead in the novel’s present),

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this is the last we hear of Winnie’s father as her reminiscences jump ahead some years from the trauma of the paternal prehistory to the resignation of the maternal years. With the father gone, Winnie’s mother takes over the operation of a lodging house, substituting the commercialized domestic atmosphere of Winnie’s middle years for the violent domestic atmosphere of her early years. Replacing one physically violent father with innumerable and interchangeable father figures whose violence takes the repressed form of economic exploitation, this new situation constitutes for Winnie “a crushing memory, an exhausting vision of countless breakfast trays carried up and down innumerable stairs, of endless haggling over pence, of the endless drudgery of sweeping, dusting, cleaning, from basement to attics; while the impotent mother, staggering on swollen legs, cooked in a grimy kitchen, and poor Stevie, the unconscious presiding genius of all their toil, blacked the gentlemen’s boots in the scullery” (SA, 242–43). The domestic does not disappear with the advent of the commercial here, but becomes coincident with it as the disappearance of the father desexualizes the mother (she is now “impotent”) and reduces each member of the family to the status of employee. The violent oppression of isolated moments of rage gives way to the grinding oppression of economic duress as Winnie’s mother, Winnie, and Stevie promiscuously market domesticity to an endless succession of father/husband figures whose most important qualification is financial solvency. This collapsing of the boundaries between the economic and the domestic in The Secret Agent takes to a new level of complexity Conrad’s focus on biopolitical production as a determining characteristic of incipient Empire. In this case, the totalizing power of capitalist rationalization impinges upon the libidinal lives of its subjects so that they become literally indistinguishable from their jobs; Empire’s capacity for biopolitical production borrows the constitutive reality of subjective méconnaissance to make economic alienation a fundamental condition of existence. The critique Conrad articulates in his relation of this process gains in clarity by virtue of a moment of utopian promise in the midst of Winnie’s fable of proto-Imperial subjectivity. Over against the “crushing memory” of life in the lodging house, Winnie has a vision with “a breath of a hot London summer in it, and for a cen-

The Perfect Anarchist 165 tral figure a young man wearing his Sunday best, with a straw hat on his dark head and a wooden pipe in his mouth. Affectionate and jolly, he was a fascinating companion for a voyage down the sparkling stream of life.” The promise of Winnie’s romantic liaison with the young man is undermined by the economic constraints that keep him from being able to care for both Winnie and Stevie: “[H]is boat was very small. There was room in it for a girl-partner at the oar, but no accommodation for passengers.” Faced with her conflicting desires for the young man and for Stevie’s security, Winnie suppresses her desire for the young man and transfers it onto Verloc, the stream of whose life “flow[s] through secret places” but who has the financial wherewithal to “accept . . . as a matter of course the presence of passengers.” Rather than breaking with the artificial family organization of the lodging house to pursue a healthy development of desire outside the world of commercially regulated intersubjectivity, Winnie effectively sells herself to Verloc in a repetition of the structure of family romance with which she is most familiar: “[The young man] was not a lodger. The lodger was Mr. Verloc” (SA, 243). The possibility of escape from the commercially governed “family” relations of the lodging house is thus unceremoniously foreclosed and rapidly replaced by a recontaining movement whereby Winnie conforms to the manner and expression of subjectivity that fits most smoothly with the economic pressures determining her life. The finality of her decision and its effect on her life is captured as Conrad extends the metaphor of a “stream of life” to characterize Winnie’s domestic situation after marrying Verloc: her life takes on “a domestic feeling, stagnant and deep like a placid pool, whose guarded surface hardly shuddered on the occasional passage of Comrade Ossipon, the robust anarchist with the shamelessly inviting eyes” (SA, 243). Dead to the kind of desire excited in her by the young man (repeating the desexualization of the mother following the death of the father), Winnie comes to embody repression, refusing to look beneath the surface of things for fear of what she might find there and thus remaining impervious to virtually all solicitations of desire save that of maternal concern for Stevie’s welfare. The endless deferral of gratification that Lacan conceives of as the alpha and omega of subjectivity takes on an amplified dimension

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here as it becomes a consciously selected feature of Winnie’s life. Our awareness of this amplification paves the way for a clearer understanding of the biopolitical forces at work in the intermittent, disrupted, and faulty triangulation of desire that governs domestic life in The Secret Agent. When this diffused version of desire is robbed of its object by the explosion that kills Stevie, the entire deflective (and repressive) apparatus by which Winnie governs herself collapses and she experiences a wholesale return of the repressed that culminates not only in Verloc’s death, but in her own as well. I will return to this shortly. The new orientation of Winnie’s domestic life in Verloc’s shop continues to foreclose the possibility of escaping the power of economic constraints in the domestic sphere by replicating the commercialized domesticity of the lodging house. Though the situation in the Verloc household inverts the landlord-lodger relationship, it retains the same economic configuration: though Verloc is now the owner of the house, he continues to pay (i.e., he brings in the income) while Winnie, her mother, and her brother continue to work to keep the domestic space hospitable to him. This relationship is captured best in the repeated images of Verloc as stopping only temporarily at the house, eating with his hat and coat on as though he is but a customer (SA, 37, 38, 153, 175, 182–83). The primary effect of this image is to saturate the domestic with the commercial so that there is no domestic situation that is not susceptible to analysis in economic terms. For Winnie, Stevie, and their mother the domestic space is always a commercial space whose terms are dictated by a third party and whose balance must always be guessed at—the biopolitical appears as the novel’s chief mode of engagement with the political, ethical, and libidinal realities of Conrad’s (and our own) time. This situation claims its first victim in Conrad’s prescient version of economic downsizing as Stevie’s mother, having been trained in the exchange of domestic service for economic consideration, recognizes her own redundancy in the new configuration. With Verloc occupying the position of landlord, Winnie’s mother is out of a job; nor is she needed to carry out the household duties or to mind the shop. As a result, she becomes an economic liability whose strain on Verloc’s resources threatens to upset the balance of accounts, possi-

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bly bringing about Stevie’s destitution as well as her own. Thus, with a combination of motherly solicitude and businesslike savvy that subjectively reproduces the objective conflation of the domestic with the economic, Winnie’s mother leaves the family in an effort to restore balance and forestall further “layoffs.” Conrad adds a final turn of the screw by reversing yet again the conventional registers of the domestic and the commercial; Winnie’s mother leaves her daughter’s household to throw herself on the charity of her profession, abandoning her daughter’s home for a room in an almshouse “founded by a wealthy innkeeper for the destitute widows of the trade” (SA, 152). Perhaps because she has equated the domestic with the economic for so long, Winnie’s mother feels compelled to find a domestic situation that corresponds to her earning potential, reserving for herself only “the least valuable and most dilapidated articles” of furniture left from her days as the proprietor of the Belgravian mansion (SA, 154). She transfers the remaining items to her daughter (and thereby to Verloc) in a final effort to prepay for Stevie’s accommodation: “Her act of abandonment was really an arrangement for settling her son permanently in life” (SA, 162). She chooses not to leave the furniture to Stevie for fear that such a transfer of economic wherewithal might upset the balance of power in the household and provoke Verloc to throw Stevie out of the house: “Mr. Verloc would perhaps not brook being beholden to his brother-in-law for the chairs he sat on. . . . What if Mr. Verloc suddenly took it into his head to tell Stevie to take his blessed sticks somewhere out of that?” (SA, 155). In what is practically her last act in the narrative, Winnie’s mother applies a rigorously economistic perspective to the problem of domestic configuration, revealing the logic of conflation between the two registers that forms the basis of Conrad’s critique of incipient Empire on this level. Winnie reproduces and supplements her mother’s gesture with a daily balancing of the books as she constantly attempts to justify the expense and trouble of keeping Stevie around in terms of his contributions, both actual and potential, to the smooth operation of the household: “He’s been making himself very useful. You’d think he couldn’t do enough for us. . . . You could do anything with that boy, Adolf. . . . He would go through fire for you” (SA, 183–84). In

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addition Winnie guarantees Stevie’s economic security by translating libidinal desire into economic terms and ensuring that Verloc’s libidinal account runs a constant deficit. “Confident” and “sure of the power of her charms” (SA, 191), Winnie opposes Verloc’s plan to emigrate following the explosion (for which purpose he has drawn all the money out of the bank [SA, 183]) with the simple expedient of an “unexpected and lingering kiss” that leaves Verloc “drugged” and deprives him of all resolve to flee the country since doing so would mean going without her: “If you go abroad you’ll have to go without me.” “You know I wouldn’t,” said Mr. Verloc, huskily . . . She turned her head over her shoulder and gave that man planted in front of the fireplace a glance, half arch, half cruel, out of her large eyes—a glance of which the Winnie of the Belgravian mansion days would have been incapable . . . She kept it on him for a whole second, with her grave face motionless like a mask, while she said playfully: “You couldn’t. You would miss me too much.” . . . “Exactly,” he said. (SA, 196)

Driven by “her only real concern[,] . . . Stevie’s welfare” (SA, 195), Winnie takes control of the situation by staking Verloc’s desire for her against his desire to flee the country. Recognizing a distinct threat to her and Stevie’s economic and domestic stability in Verloc’s sudden urge to flee the country, Winnie levies the toll of her desirability against Verloc’s sovereignty, coming out the clear winner and, in the process, revealing the true dimensions of the power dynamic governing their domestic arrangement. Lest this equation be thought too fanciful, we find a clearer, if more vulgar, parallel in the nature of the shop attached to the house: “The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked twoand-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry . . . [and] a few books with titles hinting at impropriety” (SA, 3). The only way into the house (SA, 199), the shop forces all who enter the domestic sphere of the Verloc family to pass through a commercial space in which the governing domestic dynamic is laid bare. In imagery that

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could only be more suggestive if the shop were a brothel, Conrad emphasizes the commodification of the libidinal as the very means by which the Verloc family retains the appearance of economic viability. In the sale of pornographic pictures, magazines, and books, the store literally capitalizes on surplus libidinal desire by effecting its exchange for surplus expendable income, just as Winnie does by converting Verloc’s libidinal desire into economic stability for Stevie. Indeed, her comfort level with this setting may be a function of her growing up in more or less reputable “business house[s]” (SA, 242), of which the Belgravian mansion in which she meets Verloc is but the latest manifestation. The mediatory element of such transactions, represented in the store by commodified objects of desire, also has its counterpart in Winnie’s domestic machinations, as she mimics the fantasy constructions such pictures feed in the “half arch, half cruel” “mask” of a glance she trains on Verloc to cement the effect of the “unexpected and lingering kiss” she has just performed for him. Such constant reconfiguration and manipulation of desire is exhausting, however, and Winnie—like Jim—compensates for the demands of her situation by constructing a fantasy in which the need for her mediation disappears and a genuinely filial relationship obtains between Verloc and Stevie: The material of their overcoats was the same, their hats were black and round in shape. Inspired by the similarity of wearing apparel, Mrs. Verloc gave rein to her fancy. “Might be father and son,” she said to herself. She also thought that Mr. Verloc was as much of a father as poor Stevie ever had in his life. She was aware also that it was her work. And with peaceful pride she congratulated herself on a certain resolution she had taken a few years before. It had cost her some effort, and even a few tears. (SA, 187)

In a poignantly naive moment, Winnie congratulates herself on the efficacy with which she has thus far managed the conflicting and competing desires of the Verloc household. At the same time, however, she evokes the troubled background that led her to the “certain resolution” driving her managerial engagement. This suggestion holds before us the compensatory nature of this fantasy, distancing

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us from Winnie’s willingness to believe in it and setting the stage for its revelation as “the supreme illusion of her life” when she learns of Stevie’s death (SA, 244). The devastation of this realization for Winnie all too easily masks an important feature of Verloc’s act of bad faith; the welter of imaginings and perceptions surrounding his attempt to make use of Stevie as a bomb-carrier detracts from the fact that he is motivated in the final instance by economic considerations. Neither a coldblooded anarchist nor even a political activist driven by the power of his convictions, Verloc simply follows the household regime established (or, more accurately, reproduced) by Winnie and translates filial loyalty into economic viability: “Mr. Verloc had augured a favorable issue to his enterprise, basing himself not on Stevie’s intelligence, which sometimes plays queer tricks with a man, but on the blind docility and on the blind devotion of the boy. Though not much of a psychologist, Mr. Verloc had gauged the depth of Stevie’s fanaticism” (SA, 229). Driven by the threat of being removed from the embassy’s payroll (“No work, no pay”) and prompted by Winnie’s efforts to get him to see Stevie as an asset in his own right, Verloc comes to see Stevie’s devotion as an untapped resource, an undeveloped bit of capital that might yield lasting returns if properly invested. “You could do anything with that boy, Adolf,” Winnie tells him, to which Verloc later responds by ironically suggesting that “Stevie would profit greatly” by going to spend time with Michaelis (SA, 188). Verloc’s strategy thus effectively reproduces Winnie’s strategy for managing desire in the domestic sphere; he uses Stevie’s filial desire as a means to an economic end just as Winnie uses Verloc’s libidinal desire to an economic end. In a manner consistent not only with the commercial exploitation of a domestic setting that characterized life in the Belgravian mansion, but also with the economic exploitation of the domestic setting undertaken by Winnie and her mother, Verloc’s treatment of Stevie is but another in a long line of economically motivated exploitations of domestic arrangements. The corrosive effect of such utilitarian conversions of libidinal energy into economic terms appears as the collapse of Winnie’s compensatory fantasy of Verloc and Stevie as father and son is followed by her realization that the difficult deflective triangulation of desire

The Perfect Anarchist 171 by which she has hitherto managed the household is no longer possible. The maintenance of this triangulation is utterly dependent on Stevie’s presence both as a motivating feature and as a safety valve for the libidinal desire she must repress in order to sustain Verloc’s image of himself as a husband first and father only (if at all) second. Stevie’s death invalidates this family structure, depriving Winnie of an alternative focus for her desire; when he disappears from the scene of this complex displacement, sublimation, repression, and deflection, the triangulation of desire it constitutes collapses. Winnie’s repressed desire returns in a pathological flood, and the latent violence of the mutually exploitative relationships governed by that triangulation returns with a vengeance. The first step in this collapse comes when Chief Inspector Heat returns the address label from Stevie’s coat; its signification of Stevie’s irremediable absence forces Winnie into an awareness that the slide of signifiers that made it possible for her to subordinate herself to Verloc is no longer viable. Unable any longer to float on the surface of the chain of signification and deferred desire by which she orders her world, Winnie is at last forced to confront the destructive weight of her repressed desire. This violence erupts as the two points of the triangle constituted by Winnie and Stevie collapse into one and the violent outcome of Verloc’s abuse of his brother-in-law’s “fanaticism” is revisited upon him with an immediacy that is lacking from the other deaths in the narrative (both Winnie’s and Stevie’s deaths take place offstage and without witnesses): As if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian, and protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes. But Mr. Verloc did not see that. . . . He saw partly on the ceiling and partly on the wall the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a carving knife. It flickered up and down [and] was . . . planted in his breast. (SA, 262–63)

With the collapse of Winnie and Stevie into one point on the figure, the triangle of desire loses its all-important vector of deflection. The

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resulting straight line sees Winnie unleash the pent-up rage and frustration of her self-denial, using its violent force to make a literal point de capiton of Verloc, pinning him to the couch and denying him any claim on her desire. The imaginary content of Verloc’s role as father and husband is thus voided as the torrent of Winnie’s desire overwhelms his complacent self-assurance and exposes him to the real of desire. The total collapse of the Verloc family romance that follows upon Verloc’s death culminates in Winnie’s suicide. A subject of displaced, deferred, and inauthentic desire for practically her entire life, Winnie is unable to cope when she is deprived of a context in which she can manage other people’s desire for her. Her suicide is Conrad’s final comment on the sterility of applying a countinghouse mentality to the economics of the libido. From the primal scene of her repressed desire for the young man to the day of Stevie’s death, Winnie has successfully moved from vessel to vessel without ever having to see beneath the surface. The tandem traumas of Stevie’s death and Verloc’s murder forever alter this attitude of self-preserving ignorance, revealing to Winnie both the lack at the heart of subjectivity (captured best in the pure signifiers of Stevie’s address label, Verloc’s bowler hat, and her own wedding ring) and the horrifying plenitude at the ground of being (the rush of the real manifested by Verloc’s seemingly endless bleeding). In the end, Winnie finds oblivion in an annihilating immersion in the unconscious, the lethal plenitude that both anchors and disrupts the subject. Clearly, when the Assistant Commissioner tells Sir Ethelred that they are “in the presence of a domestic drama” he captures the essential dimension of The Secret Agent. Indeed, Conrad will continue to link the libidinal to the political even more strenuously in Under Western Eyes. There, he deprives Razumov of anything more than a speculative genealogy, effectively conflating Razumov’s nationality with his parentage so that his experience of political upheaval occurs primarily if not exclusively in libidinal terms (e.g., his burgeoning love for Natalia). A pattern seems to emerge here, as the increasing geographical proximity of Conrad’s works to his homes (in London and, more meaningfully, in Poland) recapitulates the intimate connection between the personal and the political in his own life. This pattern culminates with the completion of Under Western

The Perfect Anarchist 173 Eyes, as Conrad lapsed into a fever and held discourse with the characters in the novel, perhaps reliving the close alignment of personal and political that characterized his childhood, his decision to leave Poland, and so much of his adult life. Along similar lines, and in parallel with Winnie’s ill-fated attempt to master desire, we find the Professor’s attempt to assume an attitude of master morality. Just as Vladimir articulates the dominant social organization, Heat the law, and Winnie the family romance, so the quasi-allegorical figure of the Professor embodies the treatment of slave morality (and the quandary of subjectivity it recapitulates) in The Secret Agent. The Professor’s nickname is the only identification he is given—he alone among the various covert agents and revolutionaries has no personal name and thus no particular nationality or traceable lineage. Conrad thus ensures his allegorical status and builds into the very fiber of his character connections both to the rationalist worldview articulated by Vladimir and the capitalist worldview according to which individuals are identified with their jobs before all else. What is more, the Professor brings together the threads represented by Vladimir, Winnie, and Heat, combining elements of the novel’s treatment of the dominant social organization (with its built-in ambivalence toward the law) and the biopolitical influence of the subject’s family romance. The effect of this melding is an explicit connection between the personal and the political as the Professor personifies the plight of the rebellious proto-Imperial subject, exploring the twin impossibilities of finding a space within the system from which to rebel (as he makes clear in his assault on Ossipon and the more conventional socialist revolutionaries) and of achieving a position outside the system from which to mount an assault. The irony of the Professor’s situation resides in the fact that though he is cognizant of the first of these impossibilities, he remains blind to the latter; his efforts to achieve and sustain such a position thus form the crux of his effectiveness in The Secret Agent’s critique of Empire. As he did for the protagonist of Lord Jim, Conrad provides a glimpse into the Professor’s early past as a way of establishing his particular mindset, predispositions, and ideological orientation: “Of humble origin, and with an appearance really so mean as to stand in the way of his considerable natural abilities, his imagination had

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been fired early by the tales of men rising from the depths of poverty to positions of authority and affluence” (SA, 80). This detail starts with a description of the material conditions under which the Professor’s subjectivity was produced in childhood and then quickly introduces the interpellative mechanism of popular literature as the determining factor in his orientation toward his “humble origin.” Like Jim, the Professor finds an imaginary compensation in the literature he reads and conducts the remainder of his life more or less in accordance with the principles it puts forth. Reading such ragsto-riches tales as Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy, the Professor enters a regime of control based on the premise that hard work is not simply a reward in its own right, but inevitably brings the worldly compensations of “authority and affluence”; the corollary implication of this ideology is that if one is not successful then one is simply not working hard enough. As a result of this intersection between the personal condition of relative poverty and the regime of capitalist imperatives veiled by the rhetoric of equal opportunity for all, the Professor is very early on situated firmly within the secularized Protestant ethic of capitalist culture. As a result, his entire worldview and conception of his place in that world is dependent on his imaginary identification with the mythic heroes of incipient Empire: “The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth—by sheer weight of merit alone” (SA, 80). The Professor’s worldview is an imaginary construction that blinds him to the real exigencies legitimated by the rhetoric of sentimental narrative. This fantasy construction sets him up for a deeply antipathetic response when he experiences the inevitable disillusionment that comes when he sees his ambitions “thwarted,” an experience that “open[s] his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous” (SA, 81). Having accepted the gospel according to Alger et al. as an article of faith regarding the relationship between the individual and the world, the Professor finds his very identity threatened when he discovers the “true nature of the world.” As a direct consequence, and without pausing to consider how accurate his new vision of the world might be, the

The Perfect Anarchist 175 Professor adopts a position that purports to oppose the regime of control into which he has been interpellated, but that ultimately retains its rigor and asceticism. Part of the reason for the Professor’s easy interpellation by the sentimental reading of his youth comes from the second significant detail regarding his formative years. In yet another echo of the drama of subjectivation in Lord Jim, the Professor’s secular interpellation is augmented by its combined religious and familial counterpart: “His father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect—a man supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness” (SA, 80). Practically all the information we have about the chief influences on the Professor during his formative years (before he was even a student), this single sentence is all the more telling for its sparseness. The severe limitation of the information it provides forces us to focus on the father’s profession as the most important familial element in the production of the Professor’s subjectivity. This detail continues to resonate with Jim’s genealogy, pointing to a similar confluence of sources of authority as the father’s domestic power is supplemented by a transcendental sanction to produce a strong slavish morality in the son. Before we consider the content of the imperatives to which the Professor would have been subjected, we should note that his father’s “itinerant” ministry would have deprived him of participation in the mainstream life of the dominant social organization. Indeed, he would not even have had the benefit of a stable and identifiable spiritual community by virtue of his father’s choice of an “obscure” sect of Christianity rather than any readily identifiable denomination. As Suresh Raval has noted, the discernible content of the teachings the Professor would have imbibed during this harsh childhood is that of strict—if not enthusiastic—Protestantism.3 The restrictions such a dogma enforces would ensure that the Professor’s subjectivity was produced under powerful proscriptions on enjoyment, the tenor of which would continue to inflect his life even after his ostensible repudiation of his father’s influence. More significantly still, this background shows 3. Suresh Raval, The Art of Failure: Conrad’s Fiction, 115.

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that the Professor’s subjectivity was produced under the influence of a fiercely personal path: righteous superiority to the great “mass of mankind” (SA, 81–82) through rigorous self-denial. This sense of a privileged personal access to a higher authority and of the inherent value of self-denial permeates the Professor’s subjectivity, forming its basic element and dominating the process of his subjectivation on both the domestic and the ideological levels. Despite his subjection to the imperatives of his father’s dogma, the Professor undergoes a transitional stage during which he forsakes its fundamentally slavish mentality and its emphasis on selfdenial as the route to some future, otherworldly reward. In a maneuver we have seen before, he abandons this rigid ethic for what he takes to be its opposite, retaining the imperative of self-denial but shifting his focus onto the worldly gratifications of power, prestige, and affluence. This transition takes place as the Professor attends college, obtaining the knowledge and qualifications that lead to his nickname: “[T]he science of colleges . . . replaced thoroughly the faith of conventicles, [producing a] moral attitude [that] translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition” (SA, 80–81). Linked to the rationalization of the dominant social organization (as it is articulated by Vladimir) not only by the fact of his education but also by the scientific stream he pursues, the Professor’s temperament nonetheless retains the religious ascetic tenor of his subjectivation. Though he repudiates the spiritual faith of his father, he adopts an equally rigid attitude of master morality, enacting the very process of secularization that characterizes modernity: he mimics Vladimir’s depiction of science as the “sacrosanct fetish” of the bourgeoisie and embodies the combination of reason and unquestioning faith that Horkheimer and Adorno identify as the most troubling consequence of the Enlightenment. Just as the hegemony of rationalism makes the priesthood over into the intelligentsia, so the Professor simply repeats his father’s professional pattern, giving up his post as “assistant demonstrator in chemistry at some technical institute” (SA, 75) to become an itinerant “moral agent” of “pedantic fanaticism” (SA, 81), preaching the eschatological gospel of the new barbarism that “grows to fruition” under the “sun of calculating reason.”4 4. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 32.

The Perfect Anarchist 177 The only real difference between the Professor’s apocalyptic mentality and that of his father is how it conceives of the reward for the righteous. Whereas the Professor’s father’s faith proclaims a reward to come in the next world as recompense for self-denial and suffering in this one, the Professor’s secularized version refuses any such “transcendental” approach, preferring the “logical” substitution of a reward in this world (SA, 72). In strict consistency with the Hegelian/Nietzschean genealogy of the master morality that he substitutes for his father’s Christian slave morality, however, the Professor’s notion of a worldly reward does not take the shape of material gain but rather of recognition. Despite his rejection of his father’s spirituality, the Professor retains the disdain for property and material wealth that forms a fundamental tenet of the doctrine by which his subjectivity was produced. Perhaps justifying this to himself in terms of a political refusal to take part in the oppressive property-driven culture of incipient Empire, the Professor opts for the combined Hegelian idealism and Nietzschean pragmatism of self-realization through domination of others: “By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige” (SA, 81). That is, he disdains material wealth in favor of recognition and respect from those whom he despises; his sense of his own accomplishment is based on the incessant replay of the originary Hegelian encounter between two consciousnesses in which the Professor always claims the upper hand. Appealing only to the objective standards of reason and “enlightened” logic (SA, 73), just as does Razumov when he agrees to become a police spy, the Professor convincingly portrays himself as having successfully escaped the slavish regime of control in which he was raised and acceded to the maximal moral and political potential of master morality. The apparent success of this move is exemplified by his stubborn self-referentiality, his disdain of death, and his selfeffacement as a subject (he prefers a vision of himself as coincident with the impersonal force of rationality free from “superstition” and sentimentality [SA, 73]). The first of these elements, self-referentiality, is perhaps the one on which the Professor prides himself most, since it frees him from having to adhere to any external value system and from having to concern himself with the preferences and sentiments

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of other people. In effect, it allows him—like Jim before him—to establish a regime of control of which he is the sole guarantor; as he perceives it, he lives entirely according to his own rules. The clearest indication of the Professor’s success at achieving this state of self-referentiality is his physical isolation not only from the “mass of mankind” but also from the other revolutionaries. He announces this fact to Ossipon as a badge of honor, an indication of the strength of his character and the force of his personality: “This is a little holiday, and I celebrate it alone. Why not? I’ve the grit to work alone, quite alone, absolutely alone. I’ve worked alone for years” (SA, 70). In keeping with the nihilist pedigree of master morality, the Professor makes his disdain for all other people a virtue trumpeted even more loudly and frequently than his ability to work and live in isolation. To begin with, he dismisses all of humanity— the “mass of mankind”—as so many “locusts” and “ants” (SA, 82). Refusing even to recognize a species similarity with the crowds he encounters in the streets of London, the Professor adopts an attitude of quintessentially masterly consciousness toward them. This attitude extends to the other (putative) revolutionaries who believe they make common cause with the Professor. Provoked by Ossipon into commenting on the commitment of his fellow “anarchists,” the Professor asserts his difference from (and superiority to) them, deriding them for their complicity with the dominant social organization they profess to want to annihilate. Lumping the “anarchists” together with the police, the Professor dismisses them out of hand as equal partners in sustaining the status quo: “You revolutionists,” the [Professor] continued, with leisurely selfconfidence, “are slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defence of that convention. Clearly you are, since you want to revolutionize it. It governs your thought, of course, and your action, too, and thus neither your thought nor your action can ever be conclusive. . . . You are not a bit better than the forces arrayed against you—than the police, for instance. . . . The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.” (SA, 69)

The Perfect Anarchist 179 Harping on the slavishness of police and terrorists alike, the Professor establishes himself as beyond such petty and shortsighted conflicts, declining to recognize either the terrorists or the police as his equals, just as Razumov disdains both the Okhrana and the revolutionaries. He assumes a position above those represented by Ossipon and Heat (for example), disdaining to treat them as his equals because they lack the “force of personality” (SA, 67) with which he credits himself and which leads to his perception of selfreferentiality. Much of the Professor’s disdain for the “mass of mankind,” the terrorists, and the police alike comes from his attitude toward death. Consistent particularly with the Hegelian primal scene upon which masterly consciousness and morality are founded, the Professor conceives of the real source of his superiority as his absolutely unsentimental willingness to die for his cause: “I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That’s their impression. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly.” “There are individuals of character amongst that lot, too,” muttered Ossipon ominously. “Possibly. But it is a matter of degree obviously, since, for instance, I am not impressed by them. Therefore they are inferior. They cannot be otherwise. . . . They depend on life . . . whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.” (SA, 68)

Making himself ultimately responsible for whether he lives or dies, the Professor justifies his disdain for all other people by taking absolute control of his own life. In Heideggerean terms, if the Professor controls the means and timing of his death, then he is the agent of his own authenticity, the purely self-referential subject who has the power to set the limits of his being at any time. The bomb he carries as “the supreme guarantee of his sinister freedom” (SA, 81) both threatens the annihilation of those around him and makes him an embodiment of the masterly consciousness that opts for death before defeat. In this regard every encounter the Professor has (especially with the police) is a repetition of the Hegelian primal scene in which,

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whether others are aware of his explosive potential or not, he claims victory afresh and reaffirms himself in his self-referentiality. Perhaps the primary example of how this fantasy construction works to sustain the Professor’s sense of his mastery takes place as he leaves the Silenus beer hall and encounters Chief Inspector Heat in an alleyway: “[H]e beheld in that one man all the forces he had set at defiance: the force of law, property, oppression, and injustice. He beheld all his enemies and fearlessly confronted them all in a supreme satisfaction of his vanity. They stood perplexed before him as if before a dreadful portent. He gloated inwardly over the chance of this meeting affirming his superiority over all the multitude of mankind” (SA, 83–84). Graduating rapidly from a realistic perception of the encounter (i.e., that Heat represents “all the forces he had set at defiance”) to an imaginary encounter with all his enemies and then to the total subjugation of all mankind, the Professor reveals the extent to which his ideal ego is dependent upon a vibrant fantasy construction of himself as the embodiment of master morality. In his defiant self-referentiality and absolute willingness to die at the least provocation, the Professor strives to be the quintessential master, the one person capable of provoking a crisis that would not only exceed but in fact collapse the existing social order. As though to confirm this self-conception, the Professor challenges Heat to arrest him then and there, reverting to the script of the Hegelian primal conflict as a way of asserting his mastery. He reads Heat’s refusal to arrest him as a capitulation, as the equivalent of the slavish consciousness’s surrender (prompted by its terror of mortality) to the supremacy of the masterly consciousness, though in fact Heat has no reason to arrest him. This Hegelian register of the Professor’s apparent mastery is matched by an explicitly Nietzschean frame of reference near the novel’s end when the Professor articulates the principles that inform the imaginary apparatus that lends coherence to his fantasy construction and his ideal ego alike. Again speaking with Ossipon in the Silenus, the Professor practically channels Nietzsche in his vision of a world run by an Übermensch and freed from the tyranny of slave morality: “I [dream] of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination. . . . Exterminate, exterminate! That is

The Perfect Anarchist 181 the only way of progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong.” . . . “You be damned,” said Ossipon without turning his head. “Why? Let that be the hope of the weak, whose theology has invented hell for the strong.” (SA, 303, 305)

Explicitly rejecting the “theology” that gave his father a profession and in which he was raised, the Professor adopts a position of master morality consistent with that of Kurtz. Even the possibility of his own death creeps into his credo as a logically acceptable conclusion to it: “‘And what remains?’ asked Ossipon in a stifled voice. ‘I remain—if I am strong enough,’ asserted the sallow little Professor” (SA, 303–4). The admission of this possibility lends an aura of objective rationality to the Professor’s moral position, allowing him to claim an incontestable superiority again on the basis of his Hegelian willingness to gamble everything for the furtherance of his nihilistic agenda. The Professor’s insistent self-characterization as the embodiment of master morality calls to mind Razumov’s certainty of his superiority to the revolutionaries he meets in Geneva even as both men are shot through with unmasterly moments of doubt. Time and again the Professor intuits the spuriousness of his fantasy construction and his resulting inability to provoke the truly devastating crisis necessary to initiate a “clean sweep”: “The resisting power of numbers, the unattackable stolidity of a great multitude, was the haunting fear of his sinister loneliness” (SA, 95). This subtle corrosion of the Professor’s self-conception finds more elaborate expression in the self-undermining nature of the various terms by which he attempts to define and guarantee his mastery. The first of these self-defeating attributes is the notion of isolation and self-referentiality that the Professor holds so dear because it sets him apart not only from the “mass of mankind” and the police, but also from other revolutionaries. In a twist on the self-referentiality of master morality that we have seen before, the Professor finds that the isolation resulting from his sense of superiority terminates not in absolute control over those around him, but in utter impotence, a tautological situation in which the only reason to undertake any kind of activity at all is so that it will be recognized by one’s equals but also in which one finds no equals and so refrains indefinitely from taking any decisive action. For the Professor this attitude appears in the guise

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of his fear of the animalistic imperviousness of the crowd he would like to blow up: They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps. That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to fear! Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind. What if nothing could move them? (SA, 82)

The irony of the Professor’s proclaimed master status comes through clearly here, as he is forced to abandon his fantasy of superiority over humanity by the very kind of emotional response of which he fears they are incapable. That is, because he disdains to recognize the mass of mankind as his equals and thus worthy of his recognition, he runs into a logical problem when he experiences a fear with regard to them. If he can feel fear regarding them, and they are utterly unlike him in their impenetrable imbecility, then it is entirely possible that they are impervious to fear and so impervious to his most useful tool of agitation. In effect, then, the isolation from the crowd upon which the Professor prides himself so much becomes the basis for his inability to manipulate it; unable to relate to the crowd because of his need to consider it as utterly insignificant while he is “force” itself (SA, 304), the Professor becomes a slave to its (potential) indifference. He is thus doomed to paralysis in his awareness that he “cannot make a large enough blank place” to arrest the inertia of inauthentic existence, and remains indistinguishable from the other anarchists in his passive complicity with the status quo—though this by no means makes of him a “humbug” no different from Ossipon, as Zdzis`aw Najder maintains.5 This paralysis points to a fundamental flaw in the rigorously rational approach the Professor brings to the problem of individual survival, exposing the fact that the fantasy that informs his ideal ego is predicated (as it was for Jim) upon his personal survival. The Professor advocates a “clean sweep” of the current social organiza5. J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, 54; Najder, Conrad in Perspective, 116.

The Perfect Anarchist 183 tion only because he imagines himself to be already among the elect who would survive such an apocalypse, determining who should live and who should die (“First the blind, then the deaf and the dumb, then the halt and the lame—and so on. Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom” [SA, 303]), rather than among those to be exterminated. Even his qualification of this expectation is followed by a blush that marks the lack of conviction behind his bravado: “‘I remain—if I am strong enough,’ asserted the sallow little Professor, whose large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far out from the sides of his frail skull, took on suddenly a deep red tint” (SA, 304). Described here as “sallow,” “little,” “thin,” and “frail,” the Professor is elsewhere characterized as “stunted” (SA, 80, 93), “mean” (80), “miserable and undersized” (81), “unwholesome-looking” (83), “weakly” (93), “sadfaced” (96), and “frail, insignificant, shabby, [and] miserable” (311). Clearly, the Professor is hardly the image of a robust anarchist with good chances of surviving a general thinning out of the population. Indeed, despite the occasional references to him as “incorruptible” (SA, 310), “fierce” (309), and “terrible” (311), the Professor is altogether the kind of person he seems most ready to exterminate when the “scrupulous prejudices” of conventional social morality collapse (73). His vision of himself as standing among the few titans left following the apocalyptic establishment of a master morality thus appears all too clearly as the most basic sort of compensatory fantasy, the ressentiment at the heart of slave morality rather than a truly masterful orientation. In sum, though he is able to expose the ideological blind spots of police and revolutionaries alike, the Professor remains blind to his own ideological position, believing himself above and beyond the struggles over the shape of “what is” and “what will be.” This blindness becomes apparent as the disparity between his image of himself as a Nietzschean Übermensch gives way to the objective exposure of his status as the quintessential homme de ressentiment, permanently harboring a fantasy of retribution for personal injustices. Initially interpellated by the slave morality of his evangelist father and the capitalist spirit of his sentimental reading, the Professor follows the set script of proto-Imperial subjectivity, abandoning religious faith for rationalist fervor and all the while unwittingly retaining slave

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morality as the organizing imperative of his life. This intersection of the individual psyche and ideological fantasy structures is the means by which Conrad retains the subjective dimension of his critique, keeping it personal so that subjectivity and politics remain intertwined and insisting on their common root in the competing pressures of incipient Empire. The final aspect of the Professor’s narrative and critical function is its allegorization of what is for Conrad the impossibility of truly disrupting Empire, showing how the dominant social organization simultaneously encourages an ethic of individualism and forecloses the possibility of effective individual activity as soon as that activity threatens to disrupt the system. Again, we can see how Conrad develops this aspect of his engagement with proto-Imperial modernity in Razumov’s efforts to master the incredibly vast forces that toy with him: from his position of slavish consciousness, trying only to win the silver medal for his essay, Razumov “takes charge” of his circumstances by betraying Haldin and then becoming a spy for the Okhrana. The mastery he achieves is, however, vitiated by his self-doubt and the need for constant self-censorship as his emotions for Natalia rebel against the control he tries to exert; finally, he is recontained by the duplex figure of Nikita/Necator, who figures simultaneously the disciplinary authority of both the Okhrana and the revolutionaries. This parallel suggests that Conrad was increasingly coming to terms with the tensions created in his own life and by his particular historical moment (the looming conflicts in Europe, the renewal of the Polish question). As Thomas C. Moser argues, Conrad’s completion of Under Western Eyes seems to mark the end of an era in the author’s life and career, so that we never again see these issues given the same incremental and cumulative treatment—though, as I hope to show in the next chapter, this is not by any means a capitulation or failure on Conrad’s part.6 Though The Secret Agent is set in London, one of the centers of imperialist power at the turn of the twentieth century, it presents us with a sweepingly deterritorialized vision of history and politics. This insistent deterritorialization—and the decentering to which the novel itself contributes through it—appears perhaps most clearly 6. Thomas C. Moser, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline, 102.

The Perfect Anarchist 185 in the figure of Vladimir, the multilingual and finally unplaceable embassy official who sets the novel’s tone. From Vladimir’s “unprincipled” ability to change languages and dialects to the cosmopolitan dimensions of the novel’s cast and its concern with an acte provocateuse planned for execution on British soil with the intention of influencing an international conference in Italy, the tone of The Secret Agent is doggedly postnational. In all these ways and more, it represents an emergently deterritorialized world order that draws our attention once again to the intensive operations of incipient Empire. These operations—the means by which Empire cultivates and reproduces itself in the subjects it already governs—provide the human dimension with which Conrad remains absorbed despite the enormous range of settings represented throughout his work. Through it all, Conrad maintains an awareness that historical events are made and experienced by individual human beings, subjects whose grasp of their circumstances and the competing imperatives that overdetermine them is at best slight and incomplete. In The Secret Agent, perhaps more than in any other of his works, Conrad zeroes in on this aspect of human experience, focusing on the domestic, individual, libidinal, and ethical dimensions of Empire’s developing hegemony to trace out how vast political plans and events translate themselves into “domestic drama.” The result is perhaps Conrad’s most direct commentary on the world order he saw beginning to manifest itself as imperialism continued to decay and collapse. Admittedly, that commentary—here as in the other novels I have examined closely—is rather bleak. I do not think that it need be seen as unremittingly so, however, and in the next chapter I will undertake an exposition of why this is so and how we can discover a truly Conradian optimism that avoids the errors he so consistently and compellingly depicts in his tales of proto-Imperial subjects gone hopelessly astray.

Conclusion



Of Weak Idealism

My primary purpose throughout this study has been to illuminate Conrad’s vision of modernity rather than to critique it. As it turns out, that vision is decidedly bleak; in the course of exploring the world around him and its impact upon individuals through his fiction, Conrad undertook a version of critical thinking about modernity that focused relentlessly on demystifying the relations between rhetoric, ideology, and utilitarian opportunism. No idée fixe, no dogmatic mania or personal obsession that finds its way into his works escapes his often savagely ironic exposure of its internal contradictions and fundamental (if enabling) blind spots. Those of his characters who pursue such single-minded ends meet with frustration, sterility, or death. And such exalted (at least in Conrad’s time) notions as Western imperialism, duty, manifest destiny, science, and legality all stand exposed as conventions whose claims to transcendent justification mask the imperatives of vested interests. The result is so devastating, so thoroughly and systematically demystifying, that it constitutes a negative hermeneutical engagement with modernity, a rigorous confrontation with some of its most central values and systems that capitalizes on the disjunction between their stated ends and their base motives to lay bare the internal contradictions and real dynamics of privilege (financial, libidinal, political, etc.) at work in them.

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In an irony Conrad would no doubt appreciate, the last thirty or so years have seen the deftness and power of his negative hermeneutical critique visited on his own work by critics seeking to expose his complicity with sexism, patriarchy, racism, classism, and elitism. Addressing problems such as the elision of African subjectivity and culture from texts like Heart of Darkness and pointing out the text’s potential complicity with the imperialist project, critics like Chinua Achebe have brought their own political awareness to bear on the contradictions between Conrad’s rhetoric and the ostensible aims of some of his work. As Achebe’s declaration that Heart of Darkness reveals Conrad to be “a bloody racist” reveals, however, these negative hermeneutical approaches run the risk of devolving into political ax grinding. Though Achebe’s comments represent an extreme example of this kind of reading, the fact remains that many critics have taken the challenge to politicize literary criticism to mean that they must read Conrad’s work no longer for its complex engagements with the perplexing contradictions of modernity, but for its complicity with (at best) or perpetuation of (at worst) racist, sexist, and classist ideologies. Such critiques often depend on either collapsing the difference between Conrad and his narrators/characters or seeing contradictions as signs of bad faith rather than ambiguous— at times ambivalent—efforts to come to terms with a profoundly contradictory phenomenon. Nonetheless, they have brought important changes to the ways in which we think about literature and to our readiness to excuse writers’ prejudices, and it is crucial that we never lose sight of the limitations of a vision like Conrad’s. Without contravening or minimizing the value of these changes, I have tried to contrast my reading of Conrad with the instrumental approaches that generated them by restoring the negative hermeneutical complexity—a complexity that is not reducible to complicity with any narrow ideological system—of at least four of his works. I have endeavored in the series of sustained and theoretically informed close readings undertaken here to demonstrate some aspects of that complexity. For example, though it is clear that Conrad wrote within the context of the new imperialism of the 1890s and after, to claim that he wrote chiefly about the new imperialism is to evade his more complex engagement with a new world order looming on the horizon. I have characterized that emergent world order variously

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as incipient global capitalism and emergent Empire, supplementing the work of Appadurai and Hardt and Negri with Zˇ izˇek’s more theoretical articulation of how particular ideological fields are formed and sustained. The result, I hope, has been an illumination of how Conrad’s novels show us the concrete particulars of Empire’s establishment of a global network of power and control. Further extending the work of Hardt and Negri, as well as that of Bongie—and in consonance with Zˇ izˇek’s formulations—I have drawn upon Lacanian psychoanalysis to point out the uncanny accuracy of Conrad’s depiction of the biopolitical production of subjectivity under Empire. In doing so, I have sought to complement the various Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial interpretations of Conrad by fleshing out the internal dynamics of Conrad’s vision. My hope is that this book provides a more balanced and complete understanding of Conrad—one that will help to lay the groundwork for a more holistic and nuanced kind of Conrad criticism. This project would not be complete, however, without some effort to discover a way out of the negative hermeneutical impasse in which Conrad criticism finds itself today. In concluding this study, therefore, I want to suggest that Conrad uses characters like Kurtz, Jim, Nostromo, and the Professor to both draw our attention to and gesture beyond the state of affairs he sees on the global horizon, a state of affairs in which the power of the individual is bound by the demands and limits of a global system. Despite the potential bleakness of this situation, Conrad’s vision remains optimistic in what I will call its weak idealism. In coining this term I am following Chris Bongie’s borrowing of Gianni Vattimo’s conception of “pensiero debole (‘weak thought’).” According to Bongie, “weak thought” dictates that the strong categories by means of which we once hoped to effect real change remain with us even as their total inadequacy to the present makes itself felt everywhere and in everything. No new categories arise to take the place of those that, weakened and hollowed out, continue to linger on in our time. [One’s resignation to this condition] . . . also, and inevitably, involves a re-signing of oneself to the strong “truths” that are being weakly overcome. Divested of their pretension to Truth, . . . these “truths” remain the only ones we have and for that reason we cannot avoid making use of them—although this

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use will henceforth be shaped by our awareness of their purely rhetorical nature.1

The weak idealism that grows out of this pattern of thought involves recognizing the emptiness of fundamental organizing concepts and yet adhering to them anyway, taking them not as unassailable truths about the world and the relationship between the individual and the corporate body but as deterritorialized tools of an imaginary unity. In crediting Conrad with a “weak idealism” consistent with Vattimo’s and Bongie’s characterizations of weak thought, I am in part clarifying, focusing, and amending a sense shared by some other recent Conrad critics. Beth Sharon Ash, for example, characterizes Conrad’s response to his negative discoveries as a “failure to mourn” that both cancels and preserves his ideals. This dual, but not dialectical, tendency places Conrad in an “impossible relation to his own text” because though the text reveals the hollowness of the ideals he would like to affirm, Conrad must deny that revelation in his need for stable values by which to live.2 Ash is accurate in perceiving that Conrad is the victim of a double bind that leads him to take apparently contradictory stances, and her sense of this dynamic is useful for explaining why we find similar patterns of narrative and similar problematics expressed in a global range of settings and with such diverse casts throughout Conrad’s work. Ultimately, however, Ash fails to see the optimism in Conrad’s persistent reaffirmation of the values he shows to be hollow. In a characteristically negative hermeneutical move, Ash concentrates on the moment at which Conrad inadvertently reveals the impossibility of the ideals he would like to preserve, reading his refusal to accept their impossibility as an unconscious rejection of the knowledge he repeatedly unearths. As a result, Ash argues, Conrad’s literary production may be read as a compulsive repetition of a realization he needs to disavow. This reading relies on a model of repression according to which Conrad first unconsciously inscribes 1. Bongie, Exotic Memories, 25. 2. Beth Sharon Ash, Writing In Between: Modernity and Psychosocial Dilemma in the Novels of Joseph Conrad, 9, 3.

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his awareness of the bankruptcy of certain ideals and then unconsciously rejects that awareness. This interpretation turns what I see as (conscious) weak optimism into (unconscious) repetition automatism. Against this model of repression, I contend that much of what made the business of writing (and living) so difficult for Conrad at times was precisely his conscious awareness of the double bind in which he found himself and which he saw as a fundamental condition of modern subjectivity. As Paul B. Armstrong puts it, “Conrad responds to his negative discoveries with an affirmation of absolutes which he proclaims all the more resolutely because they are nothing more than beliefs.”3 Conrad’s awareness of the impossibility of the ideals he values does not necessitate an unconscious “failure to mourn” so much as it provokes the assertion of a revised, contingent, and pragmatic version of those ideals. Conrad’s stoic attitude provides numerous examples of just this kind of approach to life, though perhaps none clearer than his expression of a weak adherence to lost ideals in an early letter to R. B. Cunninghame Graham: As for me, I regard the future from the bottom of a very dark past and find that nothing is permitted to me but fidelity to an absolutely lost cause, an idea without a future. Just as often, I don’t think of it at all. Everything disappears. Nothing remains but truth—a sinister and fleeting shadow whose image is impossible to capture. I regret nothing—I hope for nothing because I perceive that neither regret nor hope means anything to my own being. I bring to bear on myself a fierce and rational egoism. I repose in it. Then thought returns. Life begins again, regrets, memories and a despair darker than night.4

The Romantic posturing and obviously nostalgic tenor of this letter should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Conrad’s sentiments; given his childhood and his enduring guilt over leaving Poland rather than staying to fight for its freedom like a true son of the Polish szlachta, it would be much more surprising if he were not wistful about the possibilities for authentic action and the attain3. Armstrong, Challenge of Bewilderment, 140. 4. Conrad to Cunninghame Graham, February 8, 1899, in Collected Letters, 2:159–60 (my translation from the French).

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ment of Romantic ideals. What is more interesting about the sentiments we find expressed here is Conrad’s clear-eyed dedication to ideals and causes he knows full well to be lost forever. In a manner strikingly similar to that described by Bongie in his characterization of weak thought, Conrad at once acknowledges the emptiness of the ideals he would like to see survive and declares his ongoing fidelity to them. This declaration, too, however, might seem little more than Romantic posturing were it not for the pervasiveness of this kind of weak optimism throughout Conrad’s works (contra Bongie’s claim that Conrad’s idealism developed only in his later works).5 The ambiguous endings of novels like Almayer’s Folly, Lord Jim, and Victory, for example, simultaneously cancel certain ideals (filial loyalty, personal and professional integrity, and romantic fulfillment, respectively) and preserve their possibility. Perhaps the best example of this weakly optimistic cancellation and preservation comes in The Rover. This novel picks up on and develops the disillusionment with the 1789 revolution that Conrad, sounding very much like the Marx of “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” expressed in “Autocracy and War”: The glorified French Revolution itself, except for its destructive force, was in essentials a mediocre phenomenon. . . . The degradation of the ideas of freedom and justice at the root of the French Revolution is made manifest in the person of its heir; a personality without law or faith, whom it has been the fashion to represent as an eagle, but who was, in truth, more like a sort of vulture, preying upon the body of a Europe which did, indeed for some dozen of years, very much resemble a corpse. (NLL, 86)

These remarks may be added to Conrad’s earlier declaration to Cunninghame Graham that “fraternity means nothing unless the Cain-Abel business”6 to give a good sense of Conrad’s disdain not for ideals per se, but for their almost inevitable degradation when one attempts to realize them: “[I]t is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its royal form and power, to lose its ‘virtue’ the moment it descends from its solitary throne to work its will among the people” (NLL, 86). 5. Bongie, Exotic Memories, 148. 6. Conrad to Cunninghame Graham, February 8, 1899, in Collected Letters, 2:159.

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Never one to be mistaken for a democrat, let alone a revolutionary, Conrad thus dismisses the possibility of realizing any liberté, egalité (“justice”), and fraternité in this world, citing Napoleon Bonaparte and all leaders of democratic states as political bastards whose rule is validated only by “the sudden shout of a multitude” (NLL, 105). Conrad thus portrays the 1789 revolution as nothing more than a prolonged and particularly bloody riot that provided an opportunity for a mere thug like Bonaparte to rise to power on the whim of a mob. Conrad wrote “Autocracy and War” in 1905 and The Rover did not appear until 1923, but the sentiments remain remarkably consistent. The novel, with its villainous Robespierre-like figure Scevola, its traumatized innocent Arlette, and its salvational royalist figure Lieutenant Réal (réal is French for “royal”), is clearly critical of the 1789 revolution. Its critical tone draws much of its force from the hints, partial representations, and recountings of the events of the Terror, as well as from the perverse relations that define social life at Scevola’s house. In this regard it extends the negative hermeneutical treatment of the revolution in “Autocracy and War” by exploring its effects on an intimate and personal level, as we have seen Conrad do several times in his engagement with the deleterious effects of modernity. My focus here is not on the dimensions of that critique, however, but on the weak optimism with which Conrad seasons it. That weak optimism comes in the figure of Peyrol, the independent freebooter who has returned at long last to retire to the countryside in which he was born and, for a time, raised. Loaded down with enough gold (the acquisition of which Conrad takes care to justify so that we do not see him as another Nostromo figure) to make himself truly independent, Peyrol stands near the end of Conrad’s career as the antidote to such misguided idealists as Almayer, Jim, Kurtz, Nostromo, the Professor, Razumov, and even Victory’s Axel Heyst. In terms of The Rover’s engagement with the political questions raised by the legacy of the 1789 revolution, Peyrol represents an alternative, mythic, and above all authentic tradition of liberty, equality, and fraternity. He comes from distant seas, towers over the other characters, and even articulates an authentic version of the liberty, equality, fraternity credo that drove the revolution (and the Terror):

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The rover had also his own positive notions as to what these three words were worth. Liberty—to hold your own in the world if you could. Equality—yes! But no body of men ever accomplished anything without a chief. . . . He regarded fraternity somewhat differently. Of course brothers would quarrel amongst themselves; it was during a fierce quarrel that flamed up suddenly in a company of Brothers that he had received the most dangerous wound of his life. But for that Peyrol nursed no grudge against anybody. In his view the claim of the Brotherhood was a claim for help against the outside world.7

Though Peyrol articulates his understanding of fraternity in terms of the Brotherhood of the Coast, he formulates his conclusion in terms that leave no doubt as to its general applicability; his final declaration regarding “the claim of the Brotherhood” is syntactically parallel to his declarations regarding liberty and equality, and his language clearly resonates with Conrad’s characterization of fraternity as “the Cain-Abel business.” The difference between the exalted idealistic notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity that first drove and then perverted the 1789 revolution and Peyrol’s notions of them as contingent and pragmatic is crucial to discovering the weak optimism that characterizes Conrad’s engagement with the double bind of wanting to assert ideals and recognizing their fundamental inadequacy. Peyrol’s articulation of a workable model of liberty, equality, and fraternity is based on contingency and situatedness: his version of liberty depends on one’s ability to retain it, his version of equality is qualified by the necessity of hierarchy in order to work, and his version of fraternity protects only against external threats, not internal ones. In fact, one could easily argue that the qualifications Peyrol places upon the three revolutionary virtues render them impotent: if one must constantly struggle to retain liberty, then one is arguably constrained just as much as if one were in captivity; if equality must be subordinated to hierarchy in a potentially infinite number of cases, then it is hardly true equality; and if fraternity means that one need fear attack from one’s closest companion but not from a stranger, then it truly is only that of “the Cain-Abel business.” Peyrol’s—and, I would argue, Conrad’s—point, however, is 7. Joseph Conrad, The Rover, 132.

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precisely that these ideals should exist in muted, at times even perverted, forms. In contrast to a strong idealist like Scevola, the weak idealist Peyrol recognizes the impossibility of a lasting, bona fide realization of ideals, but does not forsake them on that count. Rather, he sees them as possibilities that he might live up to in a limited and contingent way, as foundational beliefs that make it possible for him to indulge constraint, hierarchy, and violence. Indeed, something of this mindset is what lies behind the narrator’s perplexing valorization, in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” of the crew of that ship after they nearly mutiny; it is what drives Peyrol to nurse his old “Brother” Symons back to health rather than killing him outright when he catches him spying. Neither the narrator of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” nor Peyrol acts out of simpleminded nostalgia. Rather, each sees through the specificities of his situation enough to affirm weakly the ideals that guide his conduct, knowing full well that the moment of idealization will pass almost before it can be articulated and that reliance upon it to protect him from the vagaries of this world is nothing short of foolish. Perhaps the best articulation of this position comes from Lord Jim’s Stein: “A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? . . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” This passage comes in the midst of Stein’s diagnosis of Jim as a strong idealist (or “romantic,” as Stein says), and provides the key to reading Conrad’s cautious optimism. In it Stein initially articulates a cynical and pragmatic approach to the problem of “how to live.” He suggests that life itself is the destructive element, and that the only way to survive it is not to struggle against its vagaries but to submit to them, becoming adept at redirecting currents over which you have no control, and achieving a compromise between flying and drowning by floating. This surface cynicism is undercut, however, by the weak idealism Stein articulates moments later as Marlow questions him about this theory: “[Y]ou ask me—how to be? . . . I will tell you! For that, too, there is only one way. . . . To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream— and so—ewig—usque ad finem” (LJ, 214–15). Marlow’s assertion that

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this sentiment is itself romantic leads Stein to acknowledge that recognizing the “destructive element” as insuperable is not the same as allowing oneself to drown in it. Instead, he posits a weak idealism that provides an impetus for the “exertions” by which one can live successfully in the notion that one can “follow the dream . . . usque ad finem” without falling into the trap of believing it to be attainable. To back up this claim, Stein states that both his and Jim’s romanticism (or idealism) is what allows them to exist (for Marlow and thus for us) in the first place (LJ, 216–17). Conrad was profoundly opposed to idealism of all sorts; this antipathy is at least partially behind his vilification of all revolutionary plans as well as his derision of the idées fixes of capitalists like Charles Gould. Yet he was also aware that a stance of utter cynicism is untenable and, ultimately, inhumane. The answer for him, as it is for Stein and Marlow, is to recognize the invalidity of strong idealism, of an unwavering faith in anything, and then to affirm an ethics (and possibly a politics) of contingency that, if not utopian, is not nihilist either. In the lives of Kurtz, Jim, Nostromo, and the Professor we witness progressive deterritorialization and various efforts to resist it. These efforts prove to be futile not because resistance itself is futile, but because resistance that idealistically seeks to reterritorialize (whether subjectively or politically) that which Empire deterritorializes are fatally outmoded. As Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent show, deterritorialized subjects in a politically, ideologically, morally, ethnically, and economically deterritorialized world in a state of “omni-crisis” stand little chance of establishing rigid value systems that can withstand Empire’s increasingly sophisticated regimes of control. Discerning this more and more clearly throughout his major phase, even if he never quite conceived it in the full-blown terms Hardt and Negri, Appadurai, and others have done (with the benefit of a hundred years’ hindsight), Conrad nonetheless refused to despair of the values on which he was reared. He does not follow Kurtz, Jim, Nostromo, and the Professor in their variously precipitous capitulations to or rejections of the dominant ideologies—ideologies of isolation and egoism—they perceive around them. Rather, like Peyrol and the narrator of The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” he affirms precisely those values whose strong form he has shown to be both spurious in their

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imperialist applications and inadequate to the emerging realities of the Imperial world. That is, he does so weakly, avoiding his characters’ idealistic errors even as he preserves their idealistic impulses in a manner wholly consistent with his careful optimism: “To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so.”8 Much more realistic than Hardt and Negri’s revolutionary program for the multitude’s repossession of Empire, Conrad’s hundred-year-old weak idealism, formulated in the headlights of the machine that has by now overtaken and absorbed us, supplements his diagnosis in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” and The Rover with a suggestion for “how to live” in a tendentially—if not yet totally—globalized world.

8. Joseph Conrad, “Books,” 228.

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 Index

Achebe, Chinua, 4, 187 Adventure romance, 78, 82–83, 86, 88, 93 Alienation, 27–28, 129, 164 Althusser, Louis, 19, 52, 55–56, 63, 82, 120, 131, 141 Antagonism, 14, 19, 48, 100, 108–9, 142. See also Traumatic kernel Appadurai, Arjun, 11, 13, 188, 195 Biopolitical/biopolitical production, 22–23, 188; in Heart of Darkness, 36, 52, 56–58; in Lord Jim, 66, 70, 78–80, 93–94, 97; in Nostromo, 134, 139–41; in The Secret Agent, 164, 166, 173 Biopower, 150 Bongie, Chris, 5–7, 29–30, 44, 66, 188–89, 191 British empire, 151 Capitalism, 1, 3, 26, 33, 37, 64, 68–69, 76, 80, 85, 115–16, 118, 154–55, 159–61, 188 Capitalist expansion, 31, 117–18 Colonialism, 4, 9 Commodity, 34, 42–43, 116, 132, 142, 156, 160 Conrad, Joseph: life, 1–3

—Works: The Arrow of Gold, 4; Chance, 4, 8; The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 3, 65, 114, 194, 195; An Outcast of the Islands, 3, 30, 65, 114; The Rescue, 4; The Rover, 4, 8, 191–92; Under Western Eyes, 3, 6, 8, 150, 158–60, 172, 184; Victory, 4, 191. See also Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim; Nostromo; Secret Agent, The Control: in Heart of Darkness, 29, 55–56, 60, 63; in Lord Jim, 69, 70, 75, 80, 84–85, 88, 94–95, 97; in Nostromo, 120–22, 124–25, 130–31, 143–44, 150; regimes/societies of, 9, 12, 14, 24, 195; in The Secret Agent, 163, 174–75, 177; technologies of, 62 Culture factor, 21 Death drive, 47, 89, 140 Déhiscence, 46, 103 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 13, 118 Desire, 8, 16, 18, 19–21, 23, 25, 27–28; in Heart of Darkness, 32, 35, 38–52, 56, 58, 63–64; in Lord Jim, 72, 79–80, 82–85, 87–89, 90–95, 100, 102, 105, 110–11; in Nostromo, 127–29, 136,

205

206

Index

Desire (cont.) 138, 141–43, 145; in The Secret Agent, 157, 162, 165, 168–73 Deterritorialization, 7, 9, 12–14, 115, 151, 184, 195 Disciplinarity, 13, 24, 50, 55–56, 58, 60–63, 75, 106, 110, 121–22, 124–25, 184; regimes/societies of discipline, 9, 12, 14, 24, 29, 58, 75, 106, 110; technologies of discipline, 62 Duty, 16, 19, 27, 134–35, 145, 147, 156, 186; in Lord Jim, 67–74, 82–83, 85, 93, 95–98, 100–102, 105, 108, 110 Empire, 6–11, 13–14, 22–23, 31–34, 36, 38–41, 45, 50, 52–56, 58, 60–64, 66–70, 73, 75, 77–78, 82, 93–94, 99–100, 104, 108, 110–11, 115–17, 120, 125, 141–42, 148, 150–54, 156–58, 160–64, 167, 173–74, 177, 184–85, 188, 195; extensive operations of, 3, 14, 22, 25, 39, 45, 58, 63–64, 126, 156; Imperial modernity, 6, 9, 13–14, 19, 23–24, 28–31, 33, 63, 160–61, 184; Imperial subjectivity, 31, 64, 66, 164, 183; intensive operations of, 3, 4, 13–14, 22, 39, 58, 78, 150, 156, 185 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 8–9 Enjoyment, 17–18, 21, 42, 44, 82, 84, 90, 98, 128, 175 Family romance, 20, 22–23, 28–29; in Heart of Darkness, 39–50; in Lord Jim, 78–94; in Nostromo, 126–30; in The Secret Agent, 161–73 Fantasy, 18–19, 28, 45, 69, 82–83, 86–91, 93, 98, 100–105, 110–11, 118, 142, 146, 163, 169, 174, 180–83 Fascism, 1, 18 Fetish, 43, 109, 119, 140, 152–53, 160, 176 Ford, Ford Madox, 29 Foucault, Michel, 36, 96; Discipline and Punish, 12 Globalization, 6–7, 11, 114 GoGwilt, Christopher, 5–7, 9

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 6–8, 11–14, 22–24, 29, 58, 61, 75, 117, 124, 188, 195 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 3, 7, 9, 14, 16, 19, 24, 28–66, 77–78, 114, 142, 152, 158, 161, 187, 195; the Company, 11, 14, 24, 31, 33–39, 41, 43–46, 53, 57–62, 64, 78; the Intended, 23, 34, 39, 40–44, 48–52, 56, 64; ivory, 16, 19, 34–35, 41, 43–47, 50, 55, 58–60, 62; Kurtz, 18, 23–24, 28–31, 34, 36, 39–64, 94, 142, 181, 188, 192, 195 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 16, 25–26, 97, 146, 177, 179–81; masterslave dialectic, 26; Phenomenology of Spirit, 25 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno, 17, 79, 176 Ideological State Apparatuses, 120 Ideology, 14, 16–19, 22, 27, 51–58, 62–64, 68–69, 74–75, 78, 83, 112–13, 116, 118, 120, 122, 130, 139, 141–42, 148, 174, 186 Imaginary, the, 14, 16, 20, 26, 70, 72, 74, 79, 83, 87–92, 94, 98, 106, 110–11, 118, 120, 141–42, 146, 172, 174, 180, 189 Imperialism, 1–7, 9–14, 29, 33, 38, 39, 42, 44, 53, 57, 64, 68–69, 114, 151, 153–54, 184–87, 196 Instrumental reason, 141, 152, 154–55 Interpellation, 56, 81, 84, 98, 108, 120, 122, 134, 175. See also Althusser, Louis Jouissance, 14, 17–18, 45–48, 80 Lacan, Jacques, 14, 18, 20–21, 27, 32, 34–35, 39, 46, 48, 73, 83, 100, 109, 126, 134, 165, 188 Laclau, Ernesto, 14, 150; and Chantal Mouffe, 14 Law, the, 14, 18–19, 21, 23, 191; in Heart of Darkness, 34–39, 41, 46, 55, 57, 63; in Lord Jim, 67, 69–70, 72, 75–76, 78, 84; in Nostromo, 117–18, 120–24, 125–28, 130, 134, 136, 147,

Index 149; in The Secret Agent, 158–59, 160–61, 167, 171, 173, 180 Lord Jim (Conrad), 3, 6, 8–9, 14, 16, 19, 24, 28–29, 65–114, 133, 142, 152, 158, 173, 175, 191, 195; Brierly, 69–71, 74, 78, 84, 108, 110; Gentleman Brown, 69, 91–93, 108–11, 144; Jewel, 77, 87, 89, 90, 94, 101, 106; Jim’s trial, 65–66, 70, 72–74, 84, 104; Patna, 66–67, 69, 71–73, 80, 83, 89, 98–101, 103–4, 108, 111, 143; Patusan, 69, 75–78, 85–87, 90–94, 105–8, 110, 112, 142; Stein, 29, 66, 69, 76, 78, 84–87, 105, 194–95; Tuan Jim, 77, 85, 90–92, 106–7, 110–11 Marine community, 65, 67–70, 72, 78 Marx, Karl, 14, 27, 116, 191; and Friedrich Engels, 116 Master morality, 24–26, 28; in Heart of Darkness, 50, 52, 54–58, 63–64; in Lord Jim, 69, 86, 97, 105–10; in Nostromo, 126, 135, 137–38, 142–47; in The Secret Agent, 173, 176–84. See also Slave morality Méconnaissance, 83, 103, 112, 142, 164 Mirror stage, 108–9 Misrecognition, 54, 83, 103, 112, 142 Mouffe, Chantal, 150. See also Laclau, Ernesto Multitude, 8, 23, 65, 117, 180–81, 192, 196 Nation-state, 3–4, 6, 11, 14, 34, 161 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25–27, 36, 53, 57, 143, 146, 177, 180, 183 Nostromo (Conrad), 3, 6, 9, 14, 16, 19, 24, 28–29, 62, 114–52, 158, 188, 192, 195; Gould Concession, 14, 116, 119–21, 123–27, 147, 149; material interests, 16, 116–20, 123–25, 127, 129–30, 132–33, 136, 139, 141, 143, 147–49; silver, 62, 119, 122, 124–26, 128, 130, 132, 134–36, 141–49, 184 Objet a, 18, 46, 73, 83, 89, 100, 111 Oedipal dynamic, 20–21, 129–30, 162 Omni-crisis, 60, 195

207

Paternal function, 19, 21, 70, 79, 82–94, 111, 126, 130 Pleasure principle, 79, 82, 84, 86, 90, 104 Point de capiton, 14, 16–17, 19, 34, 69, 72, 140, 152–53, 172 Primal scene, 32, 35, 39, 49, 79, 94, 163, 172, 179 Primary narcissism, 38, 46, 78, 112 Prohibition, 20, 22–23, 35, 78, 126–30 Protestant ethic, 26, 80, 85, 174 Racist, 4, 187 Rationalism, 64, 152, 155–57, 160, 173, 176, 183 Real, the, 14, 16, 18, 20, 31–32, 34, 36, 40, 43, 48, 51, 53–54, 58, 60, 63–64, 72, 81, 83, 86, 88–90, 98, 100, 112, 115, 117, 122, 138, 141, 172, 174, 179 Repetition compulsion, 89 Repression, 18–19, 44, 165, 171, 189; return of the repressed, 49, 61, 110, 166, 171 Romance. See Adventure romance Secret Agent, The (Conrad), 3, 6, 8–9, 14, 16, 19, 23–24, 29, 150–85, 195; Greenwich Observatory, 152, 155, 157; science, 16, 31, 118, 152–55, 155–58, 160, 176, 186; self-referentiality, 28, 57, 108, 111–12, 177, 179, 180–81 Slave morality, 24–29; in Heart of Darkness, 50–59, 62, 64; in Lord Jim, 94–95, 97–98, 102, 105–6, 109; in Nostromo, 126, 130, 132, 134–36, 138, 141, 143, 147, 151; in The Secret Agent, 173, 175–77, 180, 183–84. See also Master morality Social organization, 14–20, 28–31; in Heart of Darkness, 32–39, 43, 45–46, 64–65; in Lord Jim, 68–78, 85, 110; in Nostromo, 116–26, 130, 148–49; in The Secret Agent, 151–61, 173, 175–76, 178, 184 Subject, the, 14, 16–18, 22, 27, 41–42, 56, 58, 63–65, 67, 70, 78, 82, 90, 102–4, 111, 120, 125, 140, 145, 148, 161, 172–73, 184–85

208

Index

Subjectivation, 24, 33, 70, 78, 136, 142, 175–76 Symbolic order, 14, 16, 18, 21; in Heart of Darkness, 32–33, 38, 41, 46, 55; in Lord Jim, 73, 79, 82–83, 89, 102, 105, 112; in Nostromo, 124, 128, 129, 134, 139; in The Secret Agent, 157–58. See also Social organization Totalitarianism, 1, 61–62, 76, 159, 161 Traumatic kernel, 73, 74, 83. See also Antagonism

Vattimo, Gianni, 29, 188 Weak idealism, 188–89, 190–94, 196 Weak thinking, 4, 188–89, 191 Weber, Max, 26, 29, 64, 79, 116 Zˇ izˇek, Slavoj, 15–18, 52, 150, 188