Conrad's Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance

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Conrad’s Eastern Vision

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Conrad’s Eastern Vision A Vain and Floating Appearance

Agnes S.K. Yeow

© Agnes S.K. Yeow 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54529–8 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–54529–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yeow, Agnes. Conrad’s Eastern vision : a vain and ﬂoating appearance / Agnes S. K. Yeow. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54529–8 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–230–54529–7 (alk. paper) 1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924 – Knowledge – East Asia. 2. Literature and anthropology – History – 20th century. 3. Literature and history – East Asia – History – 20th century. 4. East Asia – In literature. I. Title. PR6005.O4Z955 2009 823⬘.912—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2008030686

For Bernie


Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

1 The Collision of Indistinct Ideas

30

2 Patusan and the Malays

68

3 The Rest of That Pantai Band

104

4 A Vain and Floating Appearance

147

Coda

188

Map

192

Chronology

193

Glossary

195

Notes

197

Bibliography

208

Index

227

vii

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Paula Kennedy, Christabel Scaife, Steven Hall, and the team at Palgrave Macmillan for providing a first-time author with much-needed guidance and invaluable advice. I would also like to thank Gerald Cubitt for granting me permission to use his evocative photograph for the book jacket. Thanks also to Roshdy Abu Daud for his cartographic rendering of the Malay Archipelago. Finally, to all Conradians, past and present, I owe a deep and lasting debt.

viii

Abbreviations Works by Joseph Conrad Unless otherwise stated below, quotations from Conrad’s work in the text are from the Dent Collected Edition, London, 1946–55. Almayer’s Folly and Tales of Unrest appear in one volume but are not continuously paginated and are therefore accorded separate abbreviations. Likewise, the following three volumes: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ which appears with Typhoon, Amy Foster, Falk, To-morrow; The Mirror of the Sea which appears with A Personal Record; and Tales of Hearsay which appears with Last Essays. Lastly, not every work listed below is quoted in the book. AF APR LE LJ N NB NLL OI T TH TLS TMS TNN TR TSA TSL TU V WTT Y

Almayer’s Folly A Personal Record Last Essays Lord Jim Nostromo Notes on My Books (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920) Notes on Life and Letters An Outcast of the Islands Typhoon, Amy Foster, Falk, To-morrow Tales of Hearsay ’Twixt Land and Sea The Mirror of the Sea The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ The Rescue The Secret Agent The Shadow-Line (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986) Tales of Unrest Victory Within the Tides Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether

Letters, interviews, etc. by Joseph Conrad CL

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, eds, vols 1–5; Laurence Davies, Frederick Karl, ix

x Abbreviations

JCIR

and Owen Knowles, eds, vol. 6; Laurence Davies and J.H. Stape, eds, vol. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983–2005. Ray, Martin, ed. Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990.

Other abbreviations EIC FMS NEI VOC

English East India Company Federated Malay States Netherlands East Indies Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or the United East India Company (i.e. the Dutch East India Company)

Introduction

Yes – in Borneo but as a matter of reality in my memory it is only a faded stream. I regret to see my own stupid finger pointing for ever to the spot on the map. After all, river and people have nothing true about them – in the vulgar sense – but the names. Any criticism that would look for real description of places and events would be disastrous to that particle of the universe, which is nobody and nothing in the world but myself. (CL 1: 186) My information was fragmentary, but I’ve fitted the pieces together, and there is enough of them to make an intelligible picture. (LJ 343) In the note to his first short story, ‘The Lagoon’, Conrad (1857–1924) describes a specific period of his literary career and declares, not without some nostalgia, that the story ‘marks, in a manner of speaking, the end of my first phase, the Malayan phase with its special subject and its verbal suggestions’ (NB 23). In the trajectory of Conrad’s aesthetic development, there is clearly a ‘Malayan’ phase which does not only allude to a particular subject matter but also to a particular approach to narrative: the tales belonging to this phase are said to be ‘[c]onceived in the same mood’, ‘told in the same breath’ and ‘seen with the same vision’ (NB 23–4). It can also be argued that this phase never quite left him. In reference to ‘An Outpost of Progress’, he wrote: ‘My next effort in short story writing was a departure – I mean a departure from the Malay Archipelago’. Henceforth, his stories seemed to reflect a new man of letters, sporting ‘a different moral attitude’ and seeming able ‘to capture new reactions, new suggestions, and even new rhythms for 1

2


[his] paragraphs’ (NB 26). Nonetheless, he admits that the new man he imagined himself to be was a mere illusion and that ‘in common with the rest of men nothing could deliver [him] from [his] fatal consistency’, and ends with the remark, ‘We cannot escape from ourselves’. Of his third short story attempt, he alludes to the Malay Archipelago in visual terms: ‘Reading it after many years Karain produced on me the effect of something seen through a pair of glasses from a rather advantageous position. In that story I had not gone back to the Archipelago, I had only turned for another look at it. I admit that I was absorbed by the distant view’ (NB 27). Later on, in his note to ‘The Shadow-Line’, Conrad reminisces again over the East of his youthful mariner’s career and pronounces that this was ‘that part of the Eastern Seas from which I carried away into my writing life the greatest number of suggestions’ (NB 154). Lloyd Fernando observes that ‘the region was a catalyst for the development of Conrad’s greatest themes which occupied him for a life-time. He encountered the region at a crucial point in the history of relations between East and West. He went on to see the same phenomena in all their frighteningly mingled variety in other parts of the world as well’ (Fernando, 1976: 85). Very early in his literary career, Conrad had selected a pseudonym which clearly indicated a desire to be marketed as a writer of ‘Malay’ fiction: ‘I wish to keep my name of “Kamudi” (which is pronounced “Kamoudi”), a Malay word meaning rudder’ (CL 1: 170). The choice of ‘Kamudi’ also indicates a wish to be associated with ships, the sea, and a seafaring life. To Fisher Unwin, he had spoken of Almayer’s Folly as a work on ‘Malay life, about 64,000 words’ and ‘very dear to [him]’ (CL 1: 173). Evidently and irrefutably, as the phase which had launched so brilliant a writing career, the Malayan phase exerted a profound and lasting effect on Conrad and it is incumbent on us to unravel some of the ‘suggestions’ which had inspired the artist in him. This book attempts to do just that. Arguably, Conrad’s Eastern fiction is his means of imagining a world into being, and, in so doing, establishing its boundaries. This imaginary world, ostensibly Malay, is effectively a fictional intervention in the accumulative Western construction of the East and the proliferation of meanings attached to it. The East that Conrad writes about is not only the product of its strategic location at the confluence of major civilizations and the crossroads of early modern globalization but also the result of vast political, economic, and social changes in the region itself in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Eastern Archipelago or Malay world is a complex scientific, historical, and ethnographical construct erected by Pires, Eredia, Valentijn, Wallace, McNair, and a

Introduction 3

host of other ‘serious traveller[s]’ (CL 2: 130). What Conrad achieved in light of this long tradition of literary travel and exploration is the reconstruction and reinscription of this world through the power of narrative fiction: a process he idealized as ‘rescue work’ with the claim, ‘It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words’ (NLL 13). Florence Clemens states quite categorically that ‘Conrad’s Eastern fiction is in itself an authority on the general political situation in the archipelago and on the material Malay scene’ (Clemens, 1990: 24). Indeed, Conrad’s sojourn in the Malay Archipelago1 coincided with major events taking place in the British sphere of influence2 in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, such as the enforcement of British Indirect Rule, the consolidation of the colonial state, and the carving out of new political units, as well as the strategic and diplomatic tussle with other European powers in the region, especially the Dutch. The administrative challenges faced by the colonial regime, the scramble for economic resources, revenue-collection, state financing, and the management of societies also came to the fore. As Kassim in Lord Jim would bitterly acknowledge, a new order had dislodged the old, ushering in ‘the reign of the white men who protected poor people’ (LJ 366). Many of Conrad’s Eastern tales have fictional settings based on actual ones located precisely within those grey, autonomous areas where AngloDutch boundaries were still contested. The Dutch and British attempts to annex territories which were still independent and the native realms which resisted or accommodated this rivalry are underlying themes of Conrad’s Eastern romances. G.J. Resink states that the historical period covered by the fiction, 1860–1915, saw the Dutch abandoning their policy of non-interference and gradually conquering the native states beyond Java one by one until all of them were part of Dutch possessions. Conrad ‘attempted to bring many parts of the archipelago within view of his readers, and to do so before the autonomous history of those parts was submerged in the colonial history of the Netherlands East Indies’ (Resink, 1968: 323). As such, Conrad’s Eastern corpus records the political realities of the region in the years that really mattered in terms of a transition of power, namely, from the mid to late nineteenth century and extending into the early twentieth century. Apart from tales with timelines which correspond with the period of high imperialism, stories like ‘Karain’ and Almayer’s Folly allude to native unrest, and Victory, Conrad’s last major colonial novel, is set against an empire in crisis and ‘represents his final and most far-reaching insight into the meaning of late imperialism’ (Collits, 2005: 160). A book was indeed an enterprise

4


to match that of a Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826) or a Rajah James Brooke (1803–68). Patrick Brantlinger notes that ‘[o]n several occasions Conrad compares the artist with the empire builder’ and that ‘[i]n suggesting his affinity to Kurtz, [Conrad] suggests the moral bankruptcy of his own literary project’. However, Conrad also ‘insists that once there were empire builders and great artists who kept the faith’ – ‘whether vision or illusion – which can alone sustain an empire and produce great art’ (Brantlinger, 1988: 273). It can be argued that Conrad’s artistic achievement means that he had kept the faith. Indeed, the Eastern visions he (and even his literary compatriots like Sir Hugh Clifford (1866–1941) and Sir Frank Swettenham (1850–1948)) had conjured would linger in the popular imagination long after the glow of high imperialism in British Malaya had waxed and waned. This book traces and interrogates the close, tense, and engaging dialogue between art and history as manifest in Conrad’s fiction on one level and as manifest in the larger interaction between contesting voices, be they historical, ethnographic, fictional, or non-fictional, on another level. It is a given assumption that Conrad’s vision of the Eastern Archipelago could only have been a fictional and subjective construct set within an actual but romanticized geographical and historical space. Nevertheless, it is telling that a noted scholar of Southeast Asian history like G.J. Resink has consulted Conrad’s fiction and used it as a counterpoint to affirm or strengthen his own reconstructions of what took place at the time and even to fill the gaps left by historical documents.3 In my study of Conrad’s problematization of art and history, I draw parallels between Bakhtinian thought and Conrad’s own axiom pertaining to the idea of meaning which is eternally in the future and the idea of the text which is constantly in the process of making and unmaking itself. Conrad metaphorically describes the artist’s creation as a ‘rescued fragment’ of a ‘passing phase of life’ (NB 20), evanescent, incomplete, and fragile. The artist’s calling is to render these phases of life permanent in his novels and short stories. By the same token, the Malay world in history and popular culture is a ‘fragment’ and its final meaning or the truth about it must ever be elusive. Historians themselves face uphill challenges in piecing together a coherent picture of the archipelago’s past because of the fragmentary and miscellaneous nature of historical documentary sources or what Leonard and Barbara Andaya refer to as ‘fragments of texts and recorded legends’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 77). In the course of colonial history and the numerous attempts to narrativize the Malay world, Conrad’s ‘own particular East’ (NB 91), the compelling version belonging to the ‘region of art’ (CL 7: 457), has become a

Introduction 5

strident voice in a polyphony of voices. Nevertheless, in and through Conrad’s fiction, we detect a strong dialogic relation between history and fiction and recognize that truth or meaning is only relative because loopholes in fiction and history present a combined montage of the East which is, more often than not, deceptive, inscrutable and ultimately unknowable. Notably, Conrad’s use of frame-narrators and the Marlovian narrator dramatizes this reciprocal and often problematic interaction between differing voices and points of view and calls attention to the process of interpretation. Also ‘[t]he fact that Marlow’s narrative is framed by the narrative of one of his listeners advertises, through the disjunction between private and social experience, the subjective and relative nature of perception that is such a feature of Modernist narrative’ (Knowles and Moore, 2000: 124). Conrad’s portrayal of the Malay world then sets up a dialogue between two dominant and interacting purveyors of the ‘truth’, namely art and history. Conrad recognized that fiction and history are versions of the truth. He tacitly acknowledges that fiction and history are dialogic and contesting voices which circulate inseparably. The dialogism of Conrad’s East resists any finalizing meaning, just as the doubleness and dislocations within the narratives themselves work at rendering his Malay world decidedly open-ended. In depicting the East, Conrad paints a landscape that is never what it appears to be and where stable ideas and values of civilization, culture, subjectivity, and racial difference are deconstructed. This imaginary landscape is fundamentally founded on a loophole, which is that of vision. Although it is widely acknowledged that Conrad’s Eastern vision is a romanticized construct and thus highly ‘subjective’, the politics of this visual subjectivity have not been adequately studied. In the Eastern tales, the nineteenth-century obsession with optical devices and subjective vision becomes the subject of authorial irony and distrust. In the texts, it is the deceptive nature and absence of vision that are brought into the foreground. In his ‘Author’s Note’ to Almayer’s Folly, Conrad takes issue with the popular view that ‘in those distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth’ and seems anxious to highlight the ‘misleading nature of the evidence’ (NB 3–4) by stressing on the fallibility of sight: The picture of life, there as here, is drawn with the same elaboration of detail, coloured with the same tints. Only in the cruel serenity of the sky, under the merciless brilliance of the sun, the dazzled eye

6


misses the delicate detail, sees only the strong outlines, while the colours, in the steady light, seem crude and without shadow. Nevertheless it is the same picture. (NB 4) Conrad’s East is a visual construct in the form of a hallucinated mirage, no more or less. Nevertheless, by invoking the prevailing visual culture of his times and working it to his advantage, Conrad infuses his illusion with the aura and status of truth, albeit his ‘particular’ truth. The tension between a disapproval of the new visual regime and the deployment of this same regime pervades Conrad’s Eastern vision. Nothing is anything in and of itself and both art and history are themselves dialogic and subjective. In relation to this, it would be misleading to assume that Conrad knew too few facts about the Malays and the events impinging on their world to be able to utilize these details in the service of a sophisticated ironic design. Indeed, it is a testament to Conrad’s genius that although his knowledge of the region, its inhabitants, and the historical forces at work during the time was limited, he drew considerable mileage from the little that he knew. Although his sources of information were restricted to shore gossip and books like Alfred Russel Wallace’s (1823– 1931) The Malay Archipelago, Frederick McNair’s (1829–1910) Perak and the Malays and the journals of James Brooke, his friendship with scholaradministrators like Hugh Clifford4 also generated significant conversations and exchanges on issues pertaining to the Malay and colonial politics. The rest he left to his artistic imagination since he did not subscribe to knowledge as an end in itself but rather as a means to an end. In the final analysis, even if the full extent of Conrad’s latent irony is lost on the Victorian reader whose shallow store of oriental information was probably derived from the pages of The Illustrated London News, this same irony is by no means lost on the postcolonial reader who is informed of colonial history and the ethos of the Malay world. In the much-quoted letter to his aunt written while struggling over the manuscript of Almayer’s Folly, Conrad had expressed hopes that ‘perhaps something will be born from the collision of indistinct ideas’ (CL 1: 151). Reading Conrad’s fiction in conjunction with history’s versions is akin to tracing the ‘collision’ and dialogue between ‘indistinct ideas’, namely, the ideas embodied in historical discourse and the ideas embodied in Conrad’s fictional East. In fact, such a reading may just enable the reader to glimpse at the ‘truth’ which lies just beneath the surface of words, the ‘commonplace’, ‘old’ words ‘worn thin [and] defaced by ages of careless usage’ (NB 19).

Introduction 7

For purposes of uniformity, throughout this book, the expressions ‘East’, ‘Malay world’, ‘Malay Archipelago’, and ‘Eastern Archipelago’ will be used interchangeably to allude to Conrad’s sense of not only a geographical but also a cultural, political, and exotic space which had captured and held the young seaman’s imagination from that first enchanted encounter in ‘Youth’ to that last protracted reconstruction in The Rescue. By way of justifying this non-discriminated usage, Conrad’s fictional East is clearly circumscribed by the Indian or Malay Archipelago. His own travels in Asia did not extend beyond the Celebes (Resink, 1968: 308). More importantly, the area was arguably a rich source of material for a writer of exotic, adventure, and political romances: the region was the infamous arena for Anglo-Dutch colonial rivalry and was therefore a veritable hotbed of political intrigue and conflict, colonial life, personal moral dilemmas, and the contest for power, themes about which he was so passionate. In addition, the diversity of its population profile is legendary, attesting to centuries of diasporic and cross-border movements. It was here that Conrad found the inspiration for the cast and crew of his masterfully wrought tales, ranging from exiled Bugis royals, retired pirates, disillusioned expatriates, and corrupt colonial officials to star-crossed lovers, ambiguous heroes, and treacherous villains from East and West. It was also here that he witnessed at close quarters the flotsam and jetsam of old and new empires, cast adrift in a politically volatile world of dubious morals and sterile ideals. The ‘brown, bronze, yellow faces’ of the crowds occupying the entire length of the jetty in ‘Youth’ are not the only spectacle in Conrad’s Eastern vision; the shipwrecked visitors from the sea lie within the Eastern field of vision for ‘The East looked at them without a sound’ (Y 40, 41). The solidarity suggested by the reciprocal vision of the Self and Other is further reinforced by the figure of the author himself who shares something in common with the ‘Eastern crowd’: cultural ambiguity, conflicting allegiances, and liminal identity. As Robert Hampson points out: ‘Conrad’s relation to the discursive formation “Writing Malaysia” is ... doubly problematic: his identity as a British naval officer is always destabilised by his identity as a Pole, and his main experience of the archipelago is mediated through Arab rather than European trading networks’ (Hampson, 2000: 28–9).

Fiction and history in dialogic relation Conrad’s was an age where multiple versions of the East/Orient were being generated and endorsed by civil servants, painters, travel writers,

8


scientists, anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, and novelists. In the babel of voices clamouring to deliver a template of the Malay world, Conrad’s voice is his romantic contribution to a polyphony of narratives at a time of great historical flux. In his essay on Henry James, Conrad articulates the tension and intersections between history and art in this way: Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting – on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. (NLL 17) Conrad seems to concede to the idea that fiction and history are interacting consciousnesses despite his belief that ‘fiction is nearer truth’. What emerges in the reasoning above is what Mikhail Bakhtin might describe as the ‘surplus of seeing’ or of vision where fiction sees things which history does not and vice versa. Both are merely versions of the ‘truth’. The combination of both ‘surpluses’ constitutes the whole image. Truth then is a conversation between history and fiction. It is a dialogic relation which entails two or more voices occurring simultaneously: a ‘simultaneous unity of differences’ for ‘nothing is anything in itself’ (Holquist, 1990: 36, 38). Indeed, Conrad’s East affords us glimpses into history and history affords us glimpses into Conrad’s fictional world. On the level of Conrad’s fictional world itself, the voices of history and art interact in many surprising ways. That these dialogic voices are in competition is perhaps indirectly expressed by the imagery contained in a letter to Marguerite Poradowska, in which he ruminates over the progress of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, a book inspired by his experiences in the East: ‘Everything is still chaos, but, slowly, ghosts are transformed into living flesh, floating vapours turn solid, and – who knows? – perhaps something will be born from the collision of indistinct ideas’ (CL 1: 151, emphasis added). The text potentially engendered by this ‘collision’ goes beyond mere intertextuality. What Conrad suggests is that the intertexts themselves are ‘indistinct ideas’, hence indicating the impossibility of meaning or ‘truth’. Nevertheless, as a contestant in the search for truth, Conrad would always assert the superiority of art over history: ‘And what is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose

Introduction 9

accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?’ (APR 15). The dialogism in Conrad’s envisioning of the East also propounds that nothing is ever conclusive. Loopholes exist not only in people but also in imaginary worlds. Bakhtin writes in his appreciation of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), a writer with whom Conrad shares a great deal: Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future. (Bakhtin, 1984: 166) In Estetika, Bakhtin again stresses that ‘there is neither a first word nor a last word. The contexts of dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and the most distant future’ (Bakhtin, 1990: 373). As expressed in his appreciation of James, Conrad himself believed that there were no absolute truths, only relative truths: ‘But everything is relative’ in ‘this world of relative values’ (NLL 13). Although the multitude waits ‘to hear the last word uttered’ when ‘the last word has been read’, it is ‘eminently satisfying, but it is not final’ (NLL 14, 19). The ‘unfinalizability’ of the creator’s works lies in the dialogic, heteroglot voices/consciousnesses or ‘languages’ of truth which interact with one another to create a work of art which is always making itself and constantly resisting any finalizing meaning. In his discussion of Bakhtin, Conrad and colonial discourse, V.K. Tewari notes that Conrad’s ‘rich understanding of the social, historical forces [creates] a new view of social consciousness enshrined in the process of novelisation wherein the artistic visualisation and organisation of the diversities of voices enjoy the central position’ and that ‘[i]nstead of absolutisation, there is multiplicity, flexibility and openendedness stratified in the multihued historical tropes of the living reality’ (Tewari, 1993: 35–6). In Conrad’s dialogized East, the greatest loophole presents itself in the form of vision and its subjectivity. Here, vision refers not only to the physical eye and human eyesight but also to its larger semantic field which includes the mind and its capacity for knowledge, reason, intellect, and understanding. If meaning is dialogic, open-ended, and eternally ‘in the future’, what Conrad achieves in his Eastern tales is merely to envision the East. To envision is to conceive of as a possibility in the future and Conrad does just that in his envisioning of the Malay world: he opens up vistas of what the Malay world may potentially be and not what it finally is. Conrad’s own misgivings about ‘first’ or ‘last’ words

10 Conrad’s Eastern Vision

are evident in his treatment of the Malay world where fiction and history remain perhaps, ‘indistinct ideas’. The East as imagined and authored by him and the legions of predecessors, contemporaries, and future authors is ultimately a relation of multiple voices sounding simultaneously together. The first three chapters of this book focus on Conrad’s version of the East which shows his debt to the ‘facts’ of history even though he himself regarded ‘facts’ as enigmatic, obscure, and relative, mere versions of history based on ‘second-hand impression’ (NLL 17). Conrad acknowledges that in creating a fictional world, he must surround this world with an aura of actuality. It ‘must resemble something already familiar’ (NLL 6) to his readers. This ‘something’ is arguably the historical and material ‘realities’ of the region. In the ‘Author’s Note’ to Within the Tides, Conrad states that ‘[t]he problem was to make unfamiliar things credible’: ‘To do that I had to create for them, to reproduce for them, to envelop them in their proper atmosphere of actuality. This was the hardest task of all and the most important, in view of that conscientious rendering of truth in thought and fact which has always been my aim’ (NB 129–30). The ‘rendering of truth’ in ‘fact’ is arguably the fidelity to history. In this book, history is treated as synonymous with facts insofar as history, at least to Conrad, is based on documented facts. ‘History’ in the scope of this book refers to the accumulative, collective, and contesting voices which have (re)constructed and continue to construct and record the Malay world, politically, culturally, socially, and so on. It is my contention that the sum effect of Conrad’s Malay tales is the dialogic relation or the ‘surplus of vision’ between history (‘second-hand impression’) and fiction/art (‘reality of forms’, ‘observation of social phenomena’). To be sure, reading the tales in counterpoint with history’s version enriches our appreciation of Conrad’s own interpretive and imaginative powers. Conrad saw himself as representing a world that was fast fading into oblivion as a result of colonial rule. His description of an author’s task, ‘It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words’ (NLL 13), is never more pertinent in the context of the Malay world that he witnessed in the late nineteenth century. In addition, a contrapuntal reading sheds light on the areas where fiction and history are in concord and where they are in discord, where the two narrative threads converge and where they diverge. History provides a larger picture of the Malay world itself and illuminates the absent meanings within the fiction itself. In the end, the reader may catch ‘that glimpse of truth for which [the reader has] forgotten to ask’ (NB 20). The final chapter of this book focuses on the inconclusiveness of this

Introduction 11

reconstructed world by discussing the fault-lines or loopholes in the ‘surplus of vision’ itself. Ultimately, vision is a ‘language of truth’ and competes with other languages of truth. Vision is unfinalizable because it is itself dialogic, a relation. In Conrad, it takes the form of a conversation between sensory perception, aesthetic illusion, and theatricality, all of which highlight the subjectivity of vision. What becomes clear in the text is that all of these elements are themselves characterized by loopholes and defects so that in the end, Conrad’s East is, in his own words, a ‘hallucinated vision’ (APR 3) for there can never be a definitive, absolute version. Its potential is unending and the final, ‘last word’ is evasive, always in the future. Just as language is composed of multiple languages, so too is the Malay world composed of countless stories. Conrad’s literary blueprint and the East cumulatively imagined, examined, documented, or even erased in the course of history demonstrate the interplay between multiple views and experiences: a veritable heteroglossia. In the final analysis, the contestable meaning of the Malay world is the handiwork of a plurality of voices and multiple discourses of truth, fictional or historical. These multivalent voices scramble for a hearing and inevitably contribute to an enigmatic mosaic, the meaning of which is incessantly out of reach. Notably, the same dialogism is evident in Conrad’s appraisal of the self as an ever-evolving and endlessly elusive construct. Writing to Edward Garnett (1868–1937) early on in his Malayan phase, he declares: When once the truth is grasped that one’s own personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown the attainment of serenity is not very far off. ... If we are ‘ever becoming – never being’ then I would be a fool if I tried to become this thing rather than that; for I know well that I never will be anything. I would rather grasp the solid satisfaction of my wrong-headedness and shake my fist at the idiotic mystery of Heaven. (CL 1: 267–8) In Chapter 1, I begin to explore the ways in which Conrad negotiates the vexed concerns of factual authenticity and fictive storytelling in the light of his pronouncement that fiction is history or nothing. I highlight Conrad’s withering critique of the obsession with facts, especially those invented and legitimized under the rubric of colonial knowledge, and show how Conrad inflects the debate over the ‘real’ Malay with heavy irony. I then proceed to take a close look at how the creative tension between history and fiction is played out in the Eastern tales. The historical material here is arranged thematically so as to focus on

12


key historical topics that Conrad himself explored and developed in his tales. This history is read in close juxtaposition with the tales in order to highlight those historical events and situations which intersect with Conrad’s fictional world and to illustrate the dialogic and dynamic tension between art and history. The implications of this dialogic relation are also studied in light of Conrad’s desire to ‘[bring] to light the truth, manifold and one’ (NB 15). To be sure, without some of this historical reading, a niggling gap persists in our appreciation of Conrad’s Malay fiction. For one thing, reading Conrad in counterpoint with this history reveals his amazing eye for detail and concern for accuracy in spite of his disdain for ‘facts’, real or imagined. J.H. Stape, in his study of Conrad’s Siamese topography, makes an important point about the writer’s ‘remarkably accurate and detailed’ reminiscences: ‘To recognise this exactitude arguably helps enrich the reader’s understanding of the story and throws further light on Conrad’s use and transformation of real-life details in his fiction’ (Stape, 2001: 1). Ban Kah Choon has remarked on the spatial precision of the Singapore of the 1880s represented in ‘The End of the Tether’ where Captain Whalley’s contemplative progress along the waterfront maps a route which is an accurate picture of the actual site: To read about Captain Whalley’s walk in the ‘The End of the Tether’ is to be transported irresistibly back to the Singapore of the 1880s, and have the scenes and life of that period recreated for us. It is still possible today, to take the same walk and identify the buildings and place, such as the Esplanade and Clifford’s Pier, that Whalley saw. (Ban, 2000: xxiv) However, although ‘there is no denying that part of [the story’s] power comes from that very precise evocation of time and place’, Ban also recognizes that ‘beyond the ... fidelities he tried to present, something enigmatic always remains’ (Ban, 2000: xxii, xxv). Certainly, Conrad used and transformed actual details in his ‘creation of a world’ (NLL 6). The pains he took to be faithful to material reality have been noted by literary critics and historians alike (Clemens, 1990: 21–4; Resink, 1968: 307–23). In his book Cross-cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction, Hampson rightly points out that the opening chapters of Almayer’s Folly ‘very carefully situate the action in the material world of the [Malay] archipelago’ (Hampson, 2000: 101, emphasis added). However, as I shall argue, the nature of material worlds is also subject to variability, and the East observed and represented in Conrad’s fiction

Introduction 13

is the outcome of a masterful interplay of imaginative artistry and historical facts. Conrad’s proven and self-proclaimed fidelity to facts and details is less a way of suggesting that his ‘image of truth abiding in facts’ (CL 2: 200) is more authentic or reliable than that of historical accounts but more a way of saying that it is true to him and to him alone for ‘[a]ny criticism that would look for real description of places and events would be disastrous to that particle of the universe, which is nobody and nothing in the world but myself’ (CL 1: 186). In the ‘Author’s Note’ to Youth, he had described the story ‘Youth’ as ‘a feat of memory’ and ‘a record of experience; but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself’ (NB 37). And in his essay ‘Books’, he had noted that ‘every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can honestly believe’ and that ‘[t]his world cannot be made otherwise than in his own image’ (NLL 6). Nonetheless, to fellow writer Clifford he had cautioned that an image of truth can also become ‘distorted – or blurred’ if words are not handled with care because the ‘things ‘as they are’ exist in words’ (CL 2: 200). Conrad’s conflation of fiction and history makes sense when fiction is seen as projecting its own image or vision of truth: a form of fictional truth. In a letter to Richard Curle, Conrad privileges fictional truth over actual events and places: Didn’t it ever occur to you, my dear Curle, that I knew what I was doing in leaving the facts of my life and even my tales in the background? Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion. ... I call your attention to the fact that in ‘Youth’, in which East or West are of no importance whatever, ... [the text] when pinned to a particular spot must appear diminished – a fake. And yet it is true! (CL 7: 457) However, beneath all this, Conrad seems to recognize that the contest for knowledge is unending and that truth is unstable and ever out of reach. Claims made of having learnt the truth about anything are false because ‘[t]here is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is always but a vain and floating appearance’ (CL 2: 30). The true meaning of the Eastern world remains mysterious; it is ‘that region that even to this day has not been robbed of all the mystery and romance of its past’ (TR 3).

14


What I propose at this point is that at the heart of the ‘verbal suggestions’ and ‘special subject’ which Conrad equates with his Malayan phase is the contestable idea of the Malay itself: a complex matrix of cultural, political, and discursive significance to the colonial powers as well as to the many other stakeholders in the native states and controlled territories. What follows now is a rather protracted but essential discussion of a particularly laden word which had intrigued Conrad himself enough to make him declare: ‘You see how Malays cling to me!’ (CL 1: 171). This fascination with Malays may well be attributed to the problematic signifier ‘Malays’ itself along with the slippages (‘verbal suggestions’ as it were) which characterize its historical, political, cultural, and linguistic construction and which unsettle any indwelling meaning within the term itself. In a letter, he had asserted, ‘After all, river and people have nothing true about them – in the vulgar sense – but the names. Any criticism that would look for real description of places and events would be disastrous to that particle of the universe, which is nobody and nothing in the world but myself’ (CL 1: 186). It can be argued that this statement is Conrad’s analogous analysis of the split between the signifier and its material referent, the signified, or between the name and the meaning/truth behind the name. In the same way, the name ‘Malay’ contains traces of other meanings, other texts, other ‘indistinct ideas’ and hence defies ‘real description’.

Malay in Mr Conrad’s sense5 At this juncture, it may be useful to differentiate two seemingly identical terms: Malay and Malayan. I would posit a subtle difference in connotation between the two in that the former is more closely aligned with the political expediencies of the region while the latter, more fluid, term refers to any or all of the numerous ethnic inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago, which could easily include groups from places as far away as the Philippine and Sulu archipelagos and diasporic settlers such as the Chinese, Arabs, South Asians, and Jews. In ‘Mr. Conrad’s sense’ though, the racial category of ‘Malay’ is very much in keeping with colonial categories as I will show albeit inflected with irony. Arguably, the scramble to represent the Malay began when the very idea of a unitary and cohesive Malay world was mooted and eventually institutionalized. The participants of this fabrication were not exclusively Europeans as one might be wont to conclude. Long before the arrival of the West, the first indigenous kingdoms had established their

Introduction 15

commercial hegemony and political dominance over the many riverine settlements and entrepot-states dotting the coastlines and riverbanks of the region geopolitically known today as Southeast Asia. Within local circles, this region is known as Nusantara,6 also referred to as Melayu Raya, Indonesia Raya, and Maphilindo in the latter day by certain quarters with political visions of a united ‘Greater Malaya’ entity. The rise and supremacy of ethnically Malay political entities like Melaka7 in the fifteenth century attracted the people of the polyglot Nusantara to seek the protection of that prestigious sultanate and civilization. In many cases, these groups assimilated into the dominant Malay society: ‘To enjoy the privileges, they accordingly agreed to fulfil all the obligations which came with it – loyalty, trust and servitude in return for security, trade and profit. This budi-jasa (good-deed) principle of generalized and balanced reciprocity reflects the genesis of a bangsa (nation) or trans-ethnic civil society. With interethnic marriages and other assimilative and integrationist processes at work such as adoption of the Malay lingua franca, dressing and food, this genesis brought forth new hybrids of people ... to enrich the polyglot of Nusantara people who had come to accept and conform to the nucleation of cultures and values under the negara (state)’ (Karim, 2002: 22). The diaspora of Minangs, Bugis, Javanese, Orang-Laut, Boyanese, Achehnese, and many others from within the Nusantara (and from without, as in the case of the Hadhrami Arabs, the Chinese, and the Indians), did much to enrich this trans-ethnic pool. The peranakan Chinese,8 for example, is a community which best exemplifies the cultural hybridity of a people who have long made the Malayan isles their home and who practise a unique way of life combining Chinese, Malay, and European cultural traditions. Indeed, in the precolonial era, centreperiphery dualisms, and home-abroad dichotomies were already pervasive in the part of the world variously rendered as the Eastern Archipelago, the Malay Archipelago, Malayan Isles, Further India, nanyang (Chinese for ‘the southern seas’), and so on. The Melakan dynasty’s classic text, the Sejarah Melayu or ‘Malay Annals’ (a chronicle of the Sultans’ genealogy) paints the picture of a thriving trading centre with a cosmopolitan community and a globalizing outlook. Crosscultural encounters were common and xenophobia rare as traders, scholars, missionaries, and artisans from all over flocked to the centre and sometimes exchanged more than just goods but also genes in mixed marriages. Many ‘Malays’ were themselves hyphenated-Malays either through marriage or through the simple act of masuk Melayu or ‘entering the fold of the Malay’: Melayu-Jawa, Melayu-Kelantan,

16


Melayu-Minang, Melayu-Melanau, Melayu-Kedah, Melayu-Bugis, MelayuAcheh, Melayu-Siam, and so on. Khasnor Johan observes that the genealogy of the Malacca dynasty as given in the Sejarah Melayu is interesting not only because it established the reality that racial and cultural boundaries were not divisive elements within the society, but also the fact that the world known to the Malays in Malacca was far and wide. Indeed, the Malay worldview embraced the notion of an expansive but interconnected world as befitting a trading and probably, widely-travelled elite. ... the Malay world was not confining and ... the scope to move from one place to another and to set up a kingdom in a new physical space remained open. What this represents in terms of the Malay experience was a world less constrained by political and physical boundaries and thus encouraging greater mobility and wider mental horizons. (Johan, 2001: 11) What this meant also was that this world was open to outside influences and transcultural processes which in turn created hybridized identities. These hopelessly mixed identities might appear more like chaos and represent cultural pollution to imperial eyes. It is no wonder that colonial authorities felt compelled to define what or who the ‘real Malay’ was. This idea of the ‘real Malay’ had arguably taken root in the colonial imagination and become part of colonial knowledge (more of this later). It was this same knowledge which had prompted education policy makers to emphasize the teaching of classical court literature (such as the Sejarah Melayu) as well as ‘Malay history’ in the vernacular Malay-language schools. This was to fill a perceived gap in the Malay’s understanding of his own identity. R.J. Wilkinson, school inspector and patron of the Malay school system, promoted the Malay’s ‘regeneration’ by stressing the teaching of classical indigenous literature, the core of which was a mythic past rife with the depiction of divinely appointed rulers, magic, and miracles, and where the key element of Malay identity was his unswerving loyalty to the ruler. These texts were taught as literary romances and not as ‘history’. Nevertheless, in 1918, Wilkinson’s successor, R.O. Winstedt, in collaboration with one Daing Abdul Hamid, produced the first modern Malay history, the Kitab Tawarikh Melayu, to give the Malays a sense of their true historical identity. Nevertheless, this ‘encouraged the modern Malay nationalist understanding of Malayness’. Malayness ‘was no longer the product of an Archipelago diaspora, nor a civilisation into which all could assimilate, but a racial sense of lost grandeur set within the geographic boundaries established

Introduction 17

in 1909. The greatness of the Melaka sultanate had been succeeded by Portuguese, Dutch, and now British rule’ (Reid, 2002b: 17). If, in an earlier age, race and racial purity were not in the picture, now a growing sense of racial distinctness was propagated. Winstedt himself seemed preoccupied with the foreign elements (especially Indian and Arabic) he found in classical Malay texts, including histories, and sought to ‘isolate’ the Malay’s ‘racial imagination’ (Winstedt, 1969: vi) from the complex cross-fertilization of non-indigenous influences. The British emphasis on racial typology was also reflected in the census reports and methods of demographic classification. The multifarious ‘Malays’ were categorized under one racial grouping as distinct from the Chinese and Indians. Although this simplification actually extended the boundaries of Malayness, the racial or national dimension also served to restrict Malayness as different from the rest. Cultural ambiguity and hybridity 9 had no place any longer in a world of racial frontiers. It is important to note that for the precolonial Nusantara, race was not the fundamental unifier: language, adat (tradition), culture, and religion were. Entering the fold of the Malay simply meant embracing and practising the culture, language, and religion of Melaka-Malays. One became ‘ethnically’ Malay (ethnicity not being synonymous with race), and by an inherited process of ‘ethnic negotiation’, a Bugis could claim Malayness as a secondary ethnic identity, Bugis being the primary one. For the longest time, ‘the limits of Malay-ness were cultural and emotional’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 181).10 In line with colonial categories, Conrad referred to the multifarious Malays as a ‘race of men’ (TR 3) which included Malays, Bugis, Balinese, Sulus, Bajows, Dayaks, Battaks, Minangs, and so on. In the final analysis, what the colonial encounter had achieved was the racial awakening of a people, as it were. So profound was the awakening that ‘[l]ike earlier British administrators, the Malay radicals wanted to find the real Malay – Melayu jati – excluding both Anglophile aristocrats and the part-Indian or part-Arab Muslims of Singapore and Penang’ (Reid, 2002b: 18). To be sure, the European powers had deliberately built upon the old royal sites of power so as to tap into the collective memory and ethos of Malays and the Malays’ own sense of Melaka’s dominance. Nevertheless, the British had racialized and interpreted this illustrious past as one belonging to a ‘race of men’ when bangsa (arguably, the closest Malay equivalent to the notion of ‘nation’) did not fundamentally suggest the narrow sense of ‘common descent’ or ‘lineage’ as new migrant groups began to expand the semantic limits of the word. Indeed, the ‘notion of a “Malay race” (bangsa Melayu) was developed in


the nineteenth century through contact with European categorisation’ (Hampson, 2000: 13). Farish Noor writes that the Malaysian Federal Constitution’s narrow definition of ‘Malay’ (someone who speaks Malay, practises Malay culture and is Muslim) is redolent of colonial categories: ‘Rather than accept and celebrate the fact that Malay identity was complex, overdetermined, fluid and evolving, the Federal Constitution’s precise but ultimately impoverishing definition of Malay identity invariably reduced Malayness to a stock definition, reminiscent of the colonial categories of racial identity and difference during the 19th century’ (Noor, 2002: 195). It can be said that although Conrad appeared to employ the official and Victorian discourse of ‘race’, he recognized the instability and fallibility of the term and riddled it with irony. In his discussion of Conrad’s Eastern fiction, Christopher GoGwilt argues that the terms ‘nation’ and ‘race’ are ‘either so heavily allegorical that a specific political meaning is unrecoverable, or the narrative has simply adopted confused registers of political discourse’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 73). He also observes, spot-on, that ‘[d]ivided between the different scenes of Dutch and British colonial territories in the Malay Archipelago, Conrad’s fictions anticipated the problematic articulation of nation and race that would give shape to complex global and local political articulations’ (86). Khasnor Johan writes: ‘The Sejarah Melayu shows that even though Islam replaced Hinduism in the early fifteenth century, Indian cultural influences as well as individuals of Indian ancestry remained acceptable in the Malacca court ... . The genealogical account reflected the fact that cross-cultural unions were accepted without any suggestion that they were improper. There was no stigma to being a descendant of a person belonging to a different race nor was there any obstacle to intermarriage’ (Johan, 2001: 10). The notions of ‘race’, racial difference, or the horror of métissage as understood by the British were non-issues. Arguably, it is a legacy of empire that the mosaic that was the Malay people was racially differentiated from the non-Malays. Imbued with notions of racial purity and ‘national’ essence, the Malay became a part of the British ‘divide and rule’ experiment. As such, although Melaka can be said to be ‘where it all began’ (‘Melaka di mana segalanya bermula’), it has also become almost invariably tied to the notion of an exclusive bangsa Melayu or the Malays as a ‘race of men’. This colonial legacy is apparent even today inasmuch as Melaka remains an indispensable identity marker for the Malay. Slogans like ‘Melayu takkan hilang di dunia’ (‘The Malay will never vanish from the earth’, an axiom attributed to Hang Tuah, the revered Melakan warrior) continue to

Introduction 19

evince a pride in an essentialist Malay culture, civilization, and identity. Farish Noor laments the apparent obsession with ‘purity’, pointing out that from antiquity, ‘Malay civilization, like all civilizations, is a hybrid amalgam of many civilizations. We were Hindus and Buddhists before, and before that we were pagan animists who lived at peace with nature. The coming of the great religions – Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam – and the arrival of new modernist schools of thought should not be seen as distinct episodes that keep our histories apart. ... We would be able to face the future with much greater confidence if we could admit our own internal heterogeneity and complexity, rather than continually trying to deny the past and to homogenize the present into one flat, monolithic discourse of sameness’ (Noor, 2002: 202). It can be argued that in his Eastern tales, Conrad does succeed in evoking a mobile, heterogeneous and nebulous world in which exiles, expatriates, and migrants moved and had their being. As Hampson states, the ‘characteristics of the world of the Malay archipelago as represented in Conrad’s first Malay novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, are commerce, mobility, and cultural diversity’ (Hampson, 2000: 99). Fernando notes that ‘Conrad’s expatriates are not only European exiles (English, Dutch, German, and Belgian), but Malay exiles (Wajo, Ilanun, Bugis, Javanese, Dyak, and Balinese), Chinese, and others of mixed descent’ (Fernando, 1976: 82). What is not explicitly represented in the fiction is that diverse ethnic Malayans (as in inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago) could choose to masuk Melayu, to enter or assimilate into the Melaka-Malay community, if it proved economically and politically advantageous to do so. However, with the rise of the British Empire in the East, there was no option to ‘enter’ the British nation and civilization. One could adopt British or European lifestyles and acquire European tastes and opinions but one could never really enter or be absorbed into the fold as it were. While those who embraced Malayness saw themselves as Malays, became Malays, or were closely associated with Malays, those who attempted to ‘enter’ the British fold did so at their own presumption. Theoretically, those born in the Straits Settlements were British subjects. However, they were not members of the British ‘nation’; their inclusion would only transgress established ‘national’ boundaries. In the nineteenth century, the British tended to equate ‘nation’ with ‘race’ and ‘culture’ and this perception along with the belief in ‘racial types’ and ‘national character’ were carried over to the colonies where they perceived the ‘Malay’ as a ‘nation’ or ‘race’ and proceeded to impose these concepts on their subjects.

20


Christopher GoGwilt, in his insightful book, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire’, points out the ‘significant lack of national affiliation informing Conrad’s imaginative and creative work’ even though critics have discerned connections between Conrad’s Polish origins and his anticolonial sentiments. Drawing from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, GoGwilt argues that the multiple meanings of ‘nationality’ or ‘nation-ness’ as well as the problematic link between popular nationalism (propounded by the colonized) and official nationalism (propounded by empires/the colonizer) underpin Conrad’s own treatment of the ‘nation’: ‘What Anderson elsewhere diagnoses as “the inner incompatibility of empire and nation” has a direct bearing on Conrad’s repeated attempts to give imaginative shape to forms of political community traversed by conflicting allegiances of incompatible national ideas’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 7). Indeed, long before these conflicting allegiances emerged in the wake of empire, the diasporic communities of the region had displayed a knack for assimilating themselves in host societies such as that of Melaka without losing sight of ethnic origins. Their assumption of Malayness was cultural, emotional, and religious, neither ‘national’ nor ‘racial’. The colonial preoccupation with ‘national’ boundaries was in direct conflict with the native societies they encountered in the archipelago where kingdoms had no strict borders and where adaptable, trans-national bodies served to unsettle notions of ‘racial’ and ‘national’ exclusivity.11 This was a phenomenon Conrad treated with singular irony and dexterity in his Eastern tales. Further to this, D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke points out that the attempt by critics like Arnold Kettle and V.S. Pritchett to see the Polish nationalist struggle embedded in Conrad’s Malayans is misguided because ‘the Malayans and the Poles live and think in cultural contexts which are very dissimilar and at different stages in the evolution of different civilisations. Moreover, the Malayans in Conrad’s kind of milieux could not be expected to be conscious of nationality or be nationalistic in any way, Polish or Malayan’ (Goonetilleke, 1977: 88). Be that as it may, there is ample evidence to support the view that Conrad himself derived his vision of the Malay world from the colonial paradigms of the ‘master’ discourse. Raffles had written to the Asiatic Society in Bengal in 1809: ‘I cannot but consider the Malayu nation as one people, speaking one language, though spread over so wide a space, and preserving their character and customs, in all the maritime states lying between the Sulu Seas and the Southern Oceans’ (quoted in Reid, 2002a: 25). Thus, in categorizing the inhabitants of the vast archipelago

Introduction 21

according to the lingua franca, cultural similarities, and ‘character’, Raffles sweepingly envisioned the great heterogeneity of peoples (Javanese, Mollucans, Buginese, Balinese, Sumatrans, Bajaus, Sulus, Mindanaoans, and so on, migrant or otherwise, absorbed into the Melaka-Malay fold or not) as one ‘Malayu nation’. Employing the same lens, Conrad’s Bugis, Sulus, Balinese, and so on are ‘Malays’ occupying a common geopolitical region of land and sea flanked by two oceans: ‘Their country of land and water – for the sea was as much their country as the earth of their islands – ... the region of shallow waters and forestclad islands, that lies far east, and still mysterious between the deep waters of two oceans’ (TR 4). In terms of the Malay’s physical attributes and moral character, Clemens notes that Conrad ‘founded the Malay nature he portrayed on Wallace’s estimate of the race’ and that ‘[g]ood or bad’ Conrad’s Malays were ‘compressed into the Wallace mold’ (Clemens, 1990: 25). Wallace had attributed to the Malays qualities of ‘impassivity, reserve, deceiving diffidence, undemonstrativeness, circuitous speech, courtesy, lack of humor, and a short range of mental activity’ (Clemens, 1990: 25). However, a previously unelaborated point is that Conrad’s East is also deliberately set up as a veritable ‘magic circle’ (V 7; TR 285; OI 157), a circle of enchantment and entrapment as well as a narrative sphere of influence in which magical illusions, sleight-ofhand, and other ocular tricks are conjured by the magician-poet and received by the observer-reader as truth. Conrad’s task is to make the reader see his magical vision; subsequently, the spectator-reader sees for him/herself and believes in his or her own vision. There is no one definitive, authentic vision. The Malays as perceived by Wallace, Brooke and many other explorers, ‘authorities’, and writers are refracted images which may be as arbitrary as the whole artifice of civilization itself. Nevertheless, his vision is true to one who exercises a ‘scrupulous fidelity to the truth of [his] own sensations’ (NB 129), a point I take up in the last chapter of this book. To be sure, the Malay world as the Malays themselves understood it and the Malay world as romanticized, normalized, and textualized by the West are very often at odds and understandably so. Ironically, the products of early Malay literary and exegetical activity became cultural artefacts for the museums of collectors like Raffles. Among these artefacts is a version of the Sejarah Melayu manuscript. As far as Western perceptions were concerned, two further divergent strands are discernible: the romantic-sentimental discourse of writers like Raffles, Clifford, British scholar William Marsden (1754–1836), and Conrad, and the empirical understanding of administrators like Swettenham and naturalists like Wallace.

22


As if to protest his compliance with the prevailing ‘facts’ of his time, Conrad had written in response to Clifford’s adverse review of ‘Karain’ that the story ‘can only be called Malay in Mr. Conrad’s sense’ (Clifford, 1904: 849): I am inexact and ignorant no doubt (most of us are) but I don’t think I sinned so recklessly. Curiously enough all the details about the little characteristic acts and customs which they hold up as proof I have taken out (to be safe) from undoubted sources – dull, wise books. It is rather staggering to find myself so far astray. In ‘Karain’, for instance, there’s not a single action of my man (and good many of his expressions) that cannot be backed by a traveller’s tale – I mean a serious traveller’s. And yet this story ‘can only be called Malay in Mr. Conrad’s sense’. Sad. (CL 2: 130) Among the many ‘dull, wise books’ which Conrad had read in order to equip himself with the ‘facts’ are Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago and McNair’s Perak and the Malays. In tacitly deflecting any criticism of inaccuracy, Conrad states that in The Rescue ‘Nothing impossible shall happen’: ‘I shall tell of some events I’ve seen, and also relate things I’ve heard. One or two men I’ve known – about others I’ve been told many interminable tales’ (CL 1: 382). At the same time, however, he debunks and questions the need to represent the ‘facts’ or whatever’s construed as ‘facts’: ‘Thus facts can bear out my story but as I am writing fiction not secret history – facts don’t matter’ (CL 1: 382, emphasis added). Here, Conrad appears to imply that facts only matter to the historian and to suggest that history is unknowable, obscure, and ‘secret’ in spite of the facts. And yet, ironically, dull facts do and must surely matter for a novelist who aspires to be ‘a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience’ (NLL 17). It is perhaps the dynamic tension between the historian and the novelist in Conrad that has a historian like G.J. Resink remark thus: Thanks to Conrad’s literary genius, his writings give a number of glimpses into international legal and international economic conditions in Indonesia during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as no other writer has been able to provide – this even though we now know that he frequently saw the archipelago through what the Spanish call the ‘front eyes’ (anteojos, spectacles) of those who preceded him. (Resink, 1968: 308)

Introduction 23

Human experience is inevitably tied to a specific world or environment and indeed, the Malay world of Conrad’s epoch was a highly complex one. Its state of flux and political disarray might perhaps explain why Conrad’s compulsion to represent the Malay world would preoccupy him for many years. As Fernando observes: ‘Taking the arena of the Malaysian Archipelago as a whole, Conrad saw societies in the process of birth and decay as a result of their forced conjunction. His principal characters are unconsciously affected by this resonance in the conduct of their lives’ (Fernando, 1976: 82). Consider how The Rescue, the last and most belaboured of the Lingard trilogy, was a novel begun in 1896 and completed only near the end of his writing life in 1919. Incidentally, the publication of the first ‘Malay thing’ (CL 1: 338) almost coincided with the formation of the Federated Malay States (1896) and the completion of the last Malay work coincided with the acquisition of Johor, the last peninsular Malay state to concede to the appointment of a British Adviser in 1919. There appears to be an uncanny counterpoint between Conrad’s ‘Malayan phase’ (NB 23) and the political developments taking place in the region that seems to signal an intimate conversation between history and fiction. As history was being made and written in the region by the colonial administration, yet another history was being written by a man of letters. The modest reference to his first novel as a ‘Malay thing’ notwithstanding, Conrad’s foray into fiction marks a significant intervention in the master narrative and draws attention to the idea of all narratives as inevitably reflecting a complex, simultaneous sounding of both history and art (‘the collision of indistinct ideas’). As such, despite the self-effacing and dismissive tone behind ‘Malay thing’ and the vehement denial of knowledge about the Malays (more of which in the next chapter), Conrad affirms the legitimacy of his fictional version as a worthy ‘thing’ indeed. In Chapter 2, I will further enlarge on the ‘Malay in Mr. Conrad’s sense’. This chapter focuses more specifically on Conrad’s reconstruction of Malay political and religious identity. In Conrad’s fiction, irony is a manifestation of dialogic surplus. In his representation of Malay political culture and the Malay Mohammedan, Conrad provides rich ironic commentary on the Europeans in his tales. The political intrigues which are central to the tales reveal an astute insight into the political realities of the day: through Lord Jim, for instance, we gain an insight into the British administration of the Malay protected states. What is being restored and protected is not so much the actual sovereignty and executive power of Malay rulers and aristocrats. Conrad’s Jim is the


‘virtual ruler’ (LJ 273) of Patusan; Conrad does not disguise Jim’s authority with the cloak of Indirect Rule with which British Residents were empowered. GoGwilt makes the point that Jim’s title is an instance of misnaming. It recalls that ‘part of the Residential system that became a model for colonial administration throughout the Empire [which] depended on ... the confusion of [Malay] titles’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 78). Nevertheless, as I shall argue, the semantic leap from ‘Tuan’ (a polite form of respect) to ‘Lord’ may not just reflect the colonial project and a ‘problem of naming’ which ‘extends to the naming of nations and regions’ (90) between the end of the nineteenth century and the present. Conrad’s subtle critique of Indirect Rule is foregrounded precisely by the ambiguity presented by the appellation ‘Tuan’ in the context of Malay political culture, a cultural marker which provides Conrad with fodder for ironic comment. Suffice to say, in Conrad’s fictional Malay world, history and fiction commingle dialogically and almost seamlessly: Patusan is a microcosm of a Malay polity accommodating a white overlord as its ‘virtual ruler’. It is also safe to say that the narrator Marlow’s chronicle of Jim is a romantic exercise in ruler-legitimation. In classical Malay literature, there is a narrative form called the hikayat which means story, account, epic, or story of the past. The hikayat is an indispensable resource for any historian and scholar of the Malay world and Malay literature. The history of Malay royal courts is also narrated in the hikayat form. These court histories are usually palace-commissioned narratives chronicling the genealogy, legitimacy, and prestige of Malay dynasties. One example of this genre is the Sejarah Melayu mentioned earlier. Court annals are also considered historical sources that belong to classical Malay historiography. I propose that echoes of the hikayat reverberate subtly in Marlow’s ‘history’/chronicle of Jim and constitute yet another voice in the heteroglossia of Conrad’s fictional world. Most significantly, the hikayat is a narrative that is the culmination of centuries of cross-cultural encounters and interaction between the Malay Archipelago and the rest of the early modern globalized world. Farish Noor describes a wellknown example, the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa or ‘Kedah Annals’ thus: ‘Like many other Hikayats, the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa is a highly eclectic piece of writing. Various linguistic, cultural, and religious currents flow though it and the reader cannot help but listen to the chorus of different (at times competing and contesting) narratives that operate simultaneously’ (Noor, 2002: 205). He points out that the hikayat, written by thinkers and scribes from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, epitomizes the racial, cultural, and religious (Hindu,

Introduction 25

Buddhist, Islam, and paganism) diversity and ambiguities of the Malay world in antiquity and the precolonial era and bears testimony to the ‘heterogeneity and hybridity of [those] initial [moments] of intercivilisation contact’. He adds, ‘It is in the Hikayats that we see the changes that were taking place in the Malay world thanks to the arrival of Islam and – not long after that – Western culture’ (Noor, 2002: 203–4). From his reading, Conrad came across the Western critique of the hikayat12 as being documents of myth and legend, unreliable as far as historical facts are concerned since the episodes strung together in these stories contain elements of magic, the supernatural and the fantastic. Nevertheless, it is not too far-fetched to assume that it is precisely the hikayat’s ‘illogical’ and ambiguous aspects which appealed to him. Farish Noor again notes: ‘The ambiguity within [the Hikayats] reflected the ambiguity of [their writers’] times, but rather than erase these difficulties they emphasised them instead. They lived not in a world with fixed and impenetrable borders, but rather one where identities remained shifting, open and fluid’ (208). This world was an ‘already fertile and over-determined world saturated with floating signifiers’ (Noor, 2002: 205). It is easy to imagine Conrad with his own ambiguous identity relating to the openness, fluidity, ambivalence, and accommodation of the Malay world and a Malay literature teeming with ‘vain and floating’ (CL 2: 30) signifiers. I argue that Lord Jim is fashioned along the lines of a hikayat in both subject matter and form insofar as it reflects an eclectic blending not only of multiple points of view conveyed by the frame-narrators but also of multiple epistemological systems represented by fiction and history. However, this narrative fusion of art and history can offer only an imperfect picture. Not unlike the distorting ‘damaged kaleidoscope’ (157) and frivolous ‘optical toy’ (174) mentioned in Lord Jim, both art and history, being ‘indistinct ideas’, are imperfect visualizing tools. As such, the truth of the East remains perpetually obscure and out of reach. It can be argued that with the rapid encroachment of the colonial state apparatus, Conrad also appears to reinstate the anachronistic and pioneering white rajah embodied not only in James Brooke but also in the early British Residents who ruled their districts in the style of regents. Lord Jim ‘more successfully makes the Brooke myth an ironic comment on myths of Empire’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 76). In appropriating the Malay’s image of authority (i.e. the rajah), the white lord of Conrad’s East appropriates the sovereignty and legitimacy which attend this image. Nevertheless, however ‘legitimate’ or well-deserved Marlow feels Jim’s administration is, the romantic dream is short-lived and ends


tragically. For Marlow, Jim remains mainly symbolic, a figure with blurred outlines, indistinguishable, and tragic. Conrad’s fictional Malay and his treatment of Malayness reveal much about the colonial imagination and policies of his times. Even as he would appear to subscribe to some of the prevailing ‘facts’ of the day, the historical realities and his engagement with them also reveal his own critical attitudes towards the ‘civilizing work’ and the Europeans who perform it. This second chapter also discusses Conrad’s construction of Malay religious identity as a device for ironic commentary on European presumptions of racial and moral superiority. Lennox Mills writes that the ease with which the Malay States came under British control after 1874 is due to the image that the colonizers had created for themselves in the eyes of the natives: ‘Half the battle had already been won; the British had established what may be described as a moral predominance over the Malays’ (Mills, 2003: 218). Conrad’s fictional surplus allows us to see what history tends to overlook: the irony of European progress, prestige, and ‘moral predominance’ in the midst of ‘primitive’ peoples. All in all, Conrad’s portrayal of the archetypal white lord and the Malay Mohammedan is a wry and sceptical sparring with the colonial regime, its constitutive ‘facts’, and Western civilization as a whole. In the same ironic vein, Chapter 3 discusses the non-Malay groups that Conrad conjured for his imaginary East. Conrad’s ‘Pantai band’ (APR 9), comprising Malays, Chinese, Arabs, and half-castes, represents a ‘hallucinated community’ in that no such cohesive band or solidarity actually existed in the colonial state in the first place (partly as a result of British insistence on rigid racial boundaries). Conrad presents his ironic ‘Pantai band’ as a ‘hallucinated vision’ (APR 3): not a cohesive unit but one of racially split communities. This ‘band’ comprises the community which the colonial discourse of ‘protection’ delineates as Malays and which the British were treaty-bound to protect as well as the communities which had been created by the influx of immigrants from China, the Hadhramaut peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. The ‘band’ also encompasses hybridized bodies in the form of Seranis (Eurasians). For Conrad who was himself a cultural hybrid and outsider, concepts such as culture, civilization, nation, advance, regress, and atavism were unstable constructs. His portrayal of the ambiguous Pantai band in relation to the ‘civilized’ world and ‘civilized’ morality reveals an ironic stance. If his treatment of these Asian communities suggests complicity with the master discourse and idiom of ‘race’, it can be argued that Conrad uses the term ‘race’ quite without prejudice and mainly as a unifying and inclusive category. In The Rescue, the West is

Introduction 27

classified as ‘the western race’ (3). By the same token, all of the East must then be ‘the eastern race’. The ‘race of men’ (TR 3), which refers to Malays, is a category which unites a host of various communities as we have seen. Furthermore, Conrad’s usage of ‘race’ is coloured by his own conviction that ‘there is a bond between us and that humanity so far away’ (NB 4) and he often turns racial prejudices and stereotypes ironically against Europeans who presume themselves racially and morally superior. In fact, Conrad’s Pantai band serves to critique colonial exclusionary cultural policies and attitudes. The ‘others’, comprising ‘Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes’ (LJ 52) form the core of this chapter. On the whole, colonial misgivings about this amorphous community are explored and implicitly challenged in Conrad’s narratives. We learn from history that the colonial state could not have survived without the economic buttress of revenue farming, the most powerful aspects of this sector being the Chinese-controlled opium farms and the comprador farmers. Ironically, as the state grew in authority and affluence, Straits Chinese farmers and merchants were gradually edged out by the state bureaucracy. Characters like Jim-Eng provide us with a glimpse into the unsettling relation between the opium wreck and the state and the need to regulate the ‘unruly’ Chinese mob. The crowds and the ‘rest of that Pantai band’ (APR 9) include the ‘ungovernable’ (AF 105) half-caste. Characters like Nina, Jewel, Cornelius, and the Da Souzas reveal the cracks in the colonial narrativization of the British nation and force the reinscription of the halfcaste. Even the only white man on that part of the Bornean east coast, Almayer, who is Indies-born and therefore Indo-European on Dutch records at least, is marginalized at the internal frontiers of colonial racial politics. Finally, the Hadhrami Arabs and their religious and political influence over the Malays (a cause for resentment) are portrayed as a plausible threat to the empire. All in all, Conrad’s fictional treatment of ‘Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes’ is his ironic response to the ‘facts’ of colonial history. In a dialogic Malay world, fiction fills in the gaps of history even as history fills in the gaps of fiction. At day’s end, when history and fiction have exhausted their respective voices, what the reader/spectator is left with is a mere vision of what might have been. The ‘magic circle’ (V 7) which is Conrad’s Eastern Archipelago is constructed as a field of vision. From the outset of his writing career, he had spoken of fiction and the task of the writer in terms of visions: ‘I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted man who looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his visions’ (APR 8). In the oft-quoted ‘Author’s Note’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, he had

28


declared: ‘My task ... is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything’ (NB 20). Conrad’s epoch was characterized by a preoccupation with vision, regimes and categories of looking, ‘optical toys’ (LJ 174), ‘ocular demonstration’ (AF 64), and the ubiquity of vision. In Chapter 4, I explore the impact of modernity on techniques of observation, the notion of autonomous vision, truth, and the politics of the gaze, as well as how all these impinged on Conrad’s imagination. It was an age which saw the invention and popularity of optical devices such as the stereoscope, the magic lantern, the crystal ball, and visual-theatrical entertainments such as the diorama, panorama, and phantasmagoria. These devices had relied on the quirks and peculiarities of the human eye to produce the effects of pictorial ‘reality’, depth, and motion. Whatever the eye saw was subjective vision. Vision belonged to the subject/observer. In an age of subjective vision and visual technology when intermediary and mediumistic instruments of looking and reproducible images were common, the craft of the novelist presented the narrative as a lens through which to behold his ‘presented vision’ (NB 20) and the ‘image of truth abiding in facts’ (CL 2: 200). Nevertheless, this narrative vision contains its own constitutive rupture and Conrad presents it as nothing more than illusion. In the tales, the eye’s ability to deceive and be deceived emphasizes the illusory, deceptive, and subjective nature of vision. In the texts, vision as a locus of ‘truth’ is challenged. As a ‘language’ and an epistemology, composed of multiple other ‘languages’, vision’s truth is elusive. As such, the ‘surplus of vision’, whether fictional or historical, is unreliable and subjective. Whether seen through the eyes of fiction or history, or put in another way, ‘[w]hether seen in a convex or a concave mirror’, the East is ‘but a vain and floating appearance’ (CL 2: 30). In this regard, Conrad seems to take issue with the popular cultural fads of his day, exposing its superficial entertainment value; nevertheless, his own covert subscription to the principle of subjective truth behind optical artefacts reveals a paradoxical stance. As Stephen Donovan astutely observes in Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture: ‘even when presenting himself as resisting the commodification of a specific dimension of human experience (spectacle, travel, food, storytelling) by a field of popular culture, Conrad can be seen to acknowledge the latter’s inevitability and to shape his own writing in response to this historic shift, most often through a strategy of ideological and/or formal recontainment’ (Donovan, 2005: 13). As such, his ‘hallucination of the Eastern Archipelago’ (APR 5) is ensconced firmly within contemporaneous

Introduction 29

popular culture even as he negotiates the tension between his own apparent disapproval of the visual mania and his own obvious deployment of it. In the East where the sunlight dazzles and tricks the eye, ‘ghosts’, ‘phantoms’, and ‘floating vapours’ emerge and vanish as in a phantasmagoric magic lantern show. The ‘band of phantoms who retreat, fade, and dissolve – are made pallid and indistinct by the sunlight of [a] brilliant and sombre day’ (CL 1: 153). It can be argued that Conrad’s creation of a fictional new world serves, along with other versions, to fill in the void left by the destruction of the old. For Conrad, the writer’s vocation is precisely ‘[t]o snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life’ (NB 20). Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, much of the precolonial world order had disappeared or was in the process of rapid decay and transformation. In the course of colonial history and the numerous attempts to narrativize the Malay world, Conrad’s ‘own particular East’ (NB 91), the compelling version belonging to the ‘region of art’ (CL 7: 457), has proved itself a strident and deliberately ambiguous voice in a polyphony of voices. This book is dedicated to unravelling the strong dialogic relation between history and fiction in Conrad’s Eastern tales. In the process, it will attempt to demonstrate how, for Conrad, the ‘collision of indistinct ideas’ (CL 1: 151) and the contest of ‘many interminable tales’ (CL 1: 382) set the stage for the fallibility of truth and the relativism of facts. This clash of uncertainties yields a relative, evasive, and subjective truth by virtue of a visual surplus which is, more often than not, vaporous, and inscrutable. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Conrad claims a truth which belongs to ‘his own heart’s gospel’ (CL 1: 253) and which makes the reader see a world which is open, fluid, and most of all, romantic.

1 The Collision of Indistinct Ideas

the reality of the universe alone remained – a marvellous thing of darkness and glimmers. (TU 9) One of Conrad’s earliest readers was not impressed with the way in which the real Captain William Lingard was represented in Almayer’s Folly. Hans van Marle argues that this reaction demonstrates how Conrad’s ‘Tom Lingard was an easily recognizable figure for old hands in Singapore’. van Marle also points out Conrad’s ‘keen awareness of [the real Lingard’s] exemplary relevance for nineteenth-century Southeast Asian history’. More pertinently, the reader who had known the real Lingard had objected to the ‘questionable jumble of facts and fiction’ in the novel. In hindsight, however, it is precisely ‘such a questionable jumble of facts and fiction’ (van Marle, 1990: 30, 33) that lends the work a sense of Conrad’s own dialogic and sometimes conflicted approach to his literary project. In fact, paradoxically, Conrad appears to be at his most creative when ideas collide and chaos reigns. While working on Almayer’s Folly, ‘[e]verything was still chaos’; however, something was ultimately ‘born from the collision of indistinct ideas’ (CL 1: 151). In the ‘Author’s Note’ to An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad employs the same imagery in expressing his inner turmoil: [The mood of Almayer’s Folly] had left the memory of an experience that, both in thought and emotion, was unconnected with the sea, and I suppose that part of my moral being which is rooted in consistency was badly shaken. I was a victim of contrary stresses which produced a state of immobility. I gave myself up to indolence. Since it was impossible for me to face both ways I had elected to face nothing. The discovery of new values in life is a very chaotic experience; 30

The Collision of Indistinct Ideas

31

there is a tremendous amount of jostling and confusion and a momentary feeling of darkness. I let my spirit float supine over that chaos. (NB 6) Lloyd Fernando associates this chaos with the ‘dissolution of emotional and ethical bonds with one’s own racial group which takes place under [the conditions particular to the multicultural nineteenth-century Malay Archipelago]’; furthermore, convictions in the beliefs and values of one’s own group which were once stable are shaken at the very foundations: The complex of moral values and conventions of race and custom is disconcertingly seen to possess a frightening arbitrariness. The expatriate mind, caught on the rebound from the revelation of an alien life-style, finds it cannot confidently reaffirm these original values, although it may yearn for the mysterious unsuspected composure they had always previously provided. As a result, it ‘floats supine over ... chaos.’ (Fernando, 1976: 83) This view is partly corroborated by John Griffith’s study of Conrad’s anthropological dilemma or cultural anxiety as a result of dislocation and cross-cultural contact. Griffith traces Conrad’s representation and criticism of Victorian anthropological ideas about atavism, degeneration, progress, and civilization in the early writings and notes that ‘Conrad’s early works can be seen as a kind of map upon which were engraved these cultural anxieties’ (Griffith, 1995: 10). The readings of these commentators are compelling; nevertheless, there are other layers of significance to the chaos that accompanied Conrad’s imaginative process. The chaos may simply be related to Conrad’s fraught transition from a life of the sea to a life of letters, or the confusion may also have arisen out of the crucial need to write his version of human history while grappling with the established ‘facts’ of the case. In crafting his Eastern tales, what Conrad achieves in the end is a relativized discourse, a sounding together of interanimating, multiple voices. This chapter will be mostly interested in teasing out the strands of fact and fiction from within this jumble or chaos, if only to finally imply that, in Conrad’s imagination, the fact/fiction (or history/art) dualism is transmuted into mere polarities in a field of multiple consciousnesses. Both history and art engage in a dialogic relation which entails two or more voices occurring simultaneously, a unity of opposites for ‘nothing is anything in itself’ (Holquist, 1990: 36, 38). But before that, it is appropriate


to discuss some of the ways in which Conrad consciously tackles the seeming irreconcilability of history and fiction head-on.

The trouble with facts In his fiction, Conrad makes his characters pronounce ironic statements about the fixation on ‘facts’. In Victory, before his withdrawal from human affairs, ‘Hard Facts’ Axel Heyst had declared to his prospective employer: ‘There’s nothing worth knowing but facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman’ (V 7). After the closure of the coal mine, he tells Davidson, ‘Oh, I am done with facts’ (V 28). In Lord Jim, Jim rails against the tyranny and irrelevance of facts: ‘They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything’ (LJ 29)! Marlow declares that the ‘language of facts’ from which one interprets the truth is ‘so often more enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words’ (LJ 340). Recounting the proceedings of the official inquiry where Jim and other witnesses are probed for the facts relating to the Patna investigation, Marlow remarks sardonically: ‘You can’t expect the constituted authorities to inquire into the state of a man’s soul – or is it only of his liver’ (LJ 56–7)? The language of ‘facts’ and truth can only be a méllange of dialogic, heteroglot voices, as an episode from ‘Youth’ bears analogy: And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a Western voice. A torrent of words was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful silence; outlandish, angry words, ... The man up there raged aloud in two languages, ... (Y 39) Conrad himself was often too independent to remain impressed by the official ‘facts’ of the case. In Conrad’s fiction, there is a constant tension between the patriarchal and totalizing language of Empire and Conrad’s own logos, the creed which asserts that ‘[e]veryone must walk in the light of his own heart’s gospel’ (CL 1: 253). Nonetheless, Conrad’s relations to colonialism and to its orientalizing assumptions of the East do suggest imperial complicity on his part. Indeed, Stephen Donovan argues persuasively that although critics have been quick to point out that Conrad is ‘paradoxically both for and against imperialism’, there is ‘a strong case for arguing that this paradox is a mirage and that Conrad needs to be saved, as he would have seen it, from being misrepresented as sceptical about imperialism’ (Donovan, 1999: 32). Donovan shows that what Conrad objected to was the way in


33

which Western colonial enterprise was being conducted and abused or ‘a particular brand of imperialism’ (Donovan, 1999: 33) which jeopardized the British Empire as a whole. He writes: ‘From the British North Borneo Company of Almayer’s Folly to the concessionaires of Nostromo to Victory’s Tropical Belt Coal Company, Conrad’s oeuvre documents a lifelong attempt to make sense of his own experiences of colonialism with the hindsight generated by an on-going debate over models of colonial administration’ (Donovan, 1999: 52). Certainly, Conrad’s interaction with British colonial administrators, his admiration for exploreradventurers like James Brooke1 and his own travels in the colonized East had far-reaching effects on his attitude towards empire building and the Western enterprise. Moreover, in the fiction, there seems to be an implied critique of the Dutch brand of imperialism: ‘The [Dutch] officer in command ... assured those gentlemen in choice Malay of the great Rajah’s – down in Batavia – friendship and good-will towards the ruler and inhabitants of this model state of Sambir’ (AF 34). The shambles which lies at the core of this ‘model state’, the irony behind the idea of an exemplary state which is only nominally dependent on Dutch colonial rule as well as Almayer’s accusatory question, ‘What have you ever done to make me loyal’ (AF 138)?, may well support the notion of Conrad’s disaffection with the Dutch handling of their East Indies.2 Patrick Brantlinger states that ‘Conrad’s critique of Empire is never strictly anti-imperialist. Instead, in terms that can be construed as both conservative and nihilistic, he mourns the loss of the true faith in modern times, the closing down of frontiers, the narrowing of the possibilities for adventure, the commercialization of the world and of art, the death of chivalry and honor’ (Brantlinger, 1988: 274). However, it may also be argued that Conrad’s Eastern tales offer a critique of imperialism which implicitly challenges the legitimacy of ‘official’ facts manufactured by the colonial machinery. On a related note, Linda Dryden observes that Conrad had praised Hugh Clifford’s (1866–1941) governance of his native state but that unlike Clifford, who took the notion of English racial superiority for granted, he questioned the moral essence of the men sent out to manage the colonies: ‘Conrad, through Marlow’s response to Jim, implies a sense of unease and doubt about the essential “soundness” of the very men sent out to govern the Empire. This is the “moral horror” that Clifford could never acknowledge’ (Dryden, 1998: 66). Dryden states that the modernist Conrad ‘turns his imperial hero, not into a model representative of the English male, but into a deeply-flawed individual whose failure to live up to his own “shadowy ideal of conduct” reflects

34


back on the assumed “soundness” of the whole race and perhaps of the whole imperial enterprise’ (Dryden, 1998: 69). It is perhaps this moral uncertainty that frustrates all the best intentions and all the good that imperialism may purport to have and do. All things considered, Conrad’s attitude to imperialism may remain problematic and ambivalent to many but, nonetheless, he clearly entertained serious doubts about totalizing colonial claims to absolute ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, or the ‘real’ facts pertaining to the colonized as the following discussion will show. Among the ‘facts’ which were contested in colonial circles include the phenomena of the real Malay and its racial and political implications. Shamsul Amri Baharuddin notes that for the British administration, the definition of ‘Malay’ was also a practical necessity in matters such as the reservation of customary land. The Malay Reservation Enactment of 1913 defined who a Malay was but each of the eleven peninsular states had its own variations. ‘It could be argued that “Malay” and “Malayness” were created and confirmed by the Malay Reservation Enactment. However, there is more to this: the Enactment also made “Malay” and “Malay-ness” contested categories’ (Baharuddin, 2002b: 25). Baharuddin notes that it was the functional colonial understanding of Malay identity that has been ‘largely responsible in defining post-colonial Malaysia’s territory, history and society, including who the Malays, Chinese and Indians are’ (Baharuddin, 2002b: 24): In coming to Malaya, the British unknowingly and unwittingly invaded and conquered not only a territory (a physical space), but also an ‘epistemological space’, or ‘knowledge space’, as well. The ‘facts’ of this space did not exactly correspond to those of the invaders. Nevertheless, the British believed they could explore and conquer this space through translation. The first step was evidently to learn local languages. The knowledge of the languages and dialects was necessary to issue command, collect taxes, maintain law and order, and create other forms of knowledge about the people they were ruling, especially to classify, categorise and bound the vast social world that was Malaya so that it could be controlled. ... they also created a colony-wide grid in which every site could be located for economic, social and political purposes. (Baharuddin, 2002b: 24) He goes on to discuss how colonial policies and laws were organized around a set of ‘facts’, which essentially and rather arbitrarily defined Malay identity (as well as those of the other communities) and engineered social reality by means of investigative modalities resulting in


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published reports, scientific articles, gazetteers, histories, illustrated weeklies, travel narratives, and so on. A large corpus of works was propagated around the subject of the Malay and an elaborate chain of signification was duly enshrined in the colonial mindset and then disseminated to the ruled masses through the education system. Further to this, Anthony Reid notes that [c]olonial statesmen had a clear idea of what sort of Malay they should protect. Many distrusted the Straits Malays as cultural exemplars, and even dismissed them as mestizos (Spaniard or Portuguese of mixed race). The ‘real Malay’ of colonial discourse was rural, loyal to his ruler, conservative and relaxed to the point of laziness. ... The dominant element of the Malayan Civil Service took the view that its role was to protect the stereotyped Malay identity, not to change it. Clifford, the most sentimentally paternal of the governors, insisted as late as 1927, when effective power was wholly in British hands, that there must be no change in the Islamic monarchies which Britain was sworn to protect. (Reid, 2002b: 17) Arguably, the colonial insistence upon the real (e.g. true Malayness, the real Malay, the Malay’s historical identity, the Malay’s racial/ national essence) is an excess of meaning which fixes the Malay in a ‘marginal’ place. The ‘ “real” is always a site of contestation; insistence upon the real is curiously a strategic insistence upon the marginality of all experience’ (Ashcroft, 1994: 34). In his scathing review of Almayer’s Folly, Clifford had pronounced Conrad’s Malays as ‘only creations of Mr Conrad, very vividly described, very powerfully drawn, but not Malays’; to rub salt into the wound, he also foregrounds Conrad’s ‘complete ignorance of Malays and their habits and customs’ (Clifford, 1898: 142). Challenged by formidable Malaya-hands and scholaradministrators like Clifford and Frank Swettenham (1850–1948; author of a book entitled The Real Malay in 1900) whose writings were generally taken as truth, Conrad had retorted: ‘Of course I don’t know anything about Malays. If I knew only one hundredth part of what you and Frank Swettenham know of Malays I would make everybody sit up’ (NB 90). It is not hard to imagine Conrad recoiling at the very idea of the ‘real’ or essentialized Malay and to detect a disguised criticism in his retort. Robert Hampson discusses the essentializing habit among historians like William Marsden (1754/6–1836): ‘Marsden’s account of Malays in Sumatra, ... , is read as describing “the essential Malay”, whom Brooke then expects to find in other Malay communities’


(Hampson, 2000: 66). For Conrad, nothing is absolute or ‘real’. What is real or true to one man may be false to another. His view of life is one ‘that rejects all formulas, dogmas and principles of other people’s making’. In his own words: ‘These are only a web of illusions. We are too varied. Another man’s truth is only a dismal lie to me’ (CL 1: 253). His advice to John Galsworthy (1867–1933) is this: The fact is you want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism, the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth, – the way of art and salvation. In a book you should love the idea and be scrupulously faithful to your conception of life. There lies the honour of the writer, not in the fidelity to his personages. You must never allow them to decoy you out of yourself. (CL 2: 359) Terry Collits analyses the standoff between scholar-administrator and artist by locating Conrad within the history of ideas. He discusses Clifford’s and Conrad’s ‘mutual acceptance of the idea that true knowledge and literary artistry belong to separate spheres [which] obscured an important tension between them’. Conrad discriminated between art and truth as ‘a further warning against assuming that the novelist of exotic places shared the veridical aspirations of contemporary ethnographers’. Nevertheless, Collits makes the very crucial observation that Conrad ‘subsequently suggests that the distinction between knowledge of a subject and the artistic power to make it vivid is less clear-cut’ (Collits, 2005: 30). Put another way, ‘a historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian’ (NLL 17). Conrad ‘pits one way of knowing against another’; however, he ironically turns these truths on their heads and renders ‘the political meaning of his novels both contentious and baffling’ (Collits, 2005: 31, 32). Collits goes on to discuss Conrad’s fictional treatment of science in the person of Stein who, in Lord Jim, points to ‘the way in which imaginative fiction overlaps with the field of science’ and how ‘neither his positivistic methods of classifying the myriad species of lepidoptera nor his wonderment at their natural perfection helps him to know Jim’ (Collits, 2005: 32). The point is that Stein ‘foregrounds the problem of knowledge’ (Collits, 2005: 33); in this regard, characters are rendered unknowable and indeterminate. It is interesting to note that Clifford had accused Conrad of running counter to scientific facts in his portrayal of natives and Eurasians in Almayer’s Folly: ‘... Mr. Conrad has been guilty of a misdemeanour, a scientific crime no less heinous than that which would have been his had he made a light gas sink instead of ascend’ (Clifford, 1898: 142, emphasis added). He had found inexcusable, epistemological flaws in Conrad’s knowledge of the


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Malays, of Asiatics, of ‘the life of brown people’ (Clifford, 1904: 848). What Clifford failed to appreciate is that Conrad’s approach to fiction is more akin to Stein’s, in which art and science (and other forms of knowledge, e.g. history and anthropology) intersect and destabilize each other and in which gaps in knowledge are the only certainty in any claim to the ‘real’. While acknowledging that ‘the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts’ and ‘the artist descends within himself’, Conrad does not privilege either historical or scientific or fictional truth. For him, the scientist and the artist are equal in that each is motivated by the quest for ‘truth’: ‘The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal’ (NB 15–16, emphasis added). He was of the view that Clifford lacked the artist’s gift for writing fiction since the latter’s book, Studies in Brown Humanity (1927) is ‘only truth, interesting and futile, truth unadorned, simple and straightforward’ (NLL 60). His evaluation of a work that excludes alternative voices and competing consciousnesses prompts Conrad indirectly to pronounce Clifford an incompetent fiction writer: ‘One cannot expect to be, at the same time, a ruler of men and an irreproachable player on the flute’ (NLL 60). On the other hand, Christopher GoGwilt argues that the staged stand-off between colonial official and literary artist is ‘a complicated reiteration of the complicity of writing and imperialism throughout Conrad’s work’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 72). The artist’s implicit disdain for colonial knowledge (in the form of ethnographic ‘facts’) suggests that the romantically anti-imperialist Conrad wished to distance himself from the claims of knowledge pertaining to ‘the real Malay’ made unabashedly by Clifford and Swettenham. GoGwilt states that the general terms of Conrad’s rescue work seem to distinguish his romance of Malay politics from the practice of ethnographic representation. ... Yet all three writers share a common field of representation, a complicated collective ‘salvage’ ethnography – a scramble to represent ‘the real Malay’ – that belongs to the shifting representational practices concealed beneath the mapping of empires. (GoGwilt, 1995: 72) It could be however that if Conrad deliberately misrepresents the Malay subject in his fiction and debunks Clifford’s and Swetthenham’s monolithic version of ‘the real Malay’, it is perhaps to suggest that such a creature is but an incoherent, fluid, and problematic construct, the pawn of a complicated contest between established or emerging fields of knowledge. James Clifford, in his analysis of Heart of Darkness, asserts


that one of the novella’s themes is ‘the problem of truth-speaking, the interplay of truth and lie in Marlow’s discourse’. He suggests that the unnamed frame-narrator tells a story that represents ‘the ethnographic standpoint, a subjective position and a historical site of narrative authority that truthfully juxtaposes different truths’. While Marlow learns to lie and tell limited stories, the second narrator ‘salvages, compares and (ironically) believes these staged truths. This is the achieved perspective of the serious interpreter of cultures, or local, partial knowledge’ (Clifford, 1988: 99). I propose that this ethnographic subjectivity, which is directly linked to Conrad’s own ‘situation of cultural liminality’ in the Congo, can be extended to Conrad in the Malay Archipelago. James Clifford’s study focuses on the contrasts between Conrad’s Congo narrative and Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1844–1942) narrative of the Trobriands. These differences are also apparent between Conrad’s Malay fictions and the fictional/non-fictional accounts of Malaya-hands. The Malaya-hands ‘[devote themselves] to constructing realistic cultural fictions, whereas Conrad, though similarly committed, represents the activity as a contextually limited practice of storytelling’. It can be argued that Conrad, in both darkest Africa and exotic East, ‘takes an ironic position with respect to representational truth’ (Clifford, 1988: 100). In my view, the place where Conrad’s scepticism about the factual authenticity of Oriental and colonial historical knowledge is obliquely expressed is Stein’s residence, at the time of Marlow’s encounter with the butterfly hunter. Stein is an acknowledged authority on native affairs: ‘He was as full of information about native States as an official report’ (LJ 227). As an entomologist and ‘naturalist of some distinction’ (LJ 203), Stein deals with an exact science where documenting and analysing exact specimens and scientific facts count. Marlow had gone to Stein for a diagnosis of Jim’s predicament. However, the main impression of Stein that Marlow and the reader are left with is his incorrigibly romantic and dreamy disposition. Stein, the romantic, recognizes another romantic soul in Jim and his almost whimsical answer to the question of ‘how to be’ is to ‘follow the dream, and again to follow the dream – and so – ewig – usque ad finem ...’ (LJ 215). Stein’s existence and his science appear as fragile and dreamlike as the butterflies he hunts and collects. His natural history, tinged with mystery and romance, is appreciated by Marlow who is dismayed by his own unimaginative audience. Marlow labours to customize his tale and curb his eloquence to suit his listeners’ practical minds: Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations


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to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions – and safe – and profitable – and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone – and as short-lived, alas! (LJ 225) Marlow’s narrative hints at the dialogic relation between romance (illusion, the glamour of art) and the ‘facts’ or history of the case. Faced with an audience which has no illusions, Marlow has had to contend and grapple with the ‘facts’ just as Jim himself struggles with facts ‘as if facts could explain anything’ (LJ 29). Even ‘facts’ generated by dull, unimaginative minds do not constitute the whole and ultimate truth; the narratives work at unsettling the ‘facts’ by constantly drawing attention to how abstract, insubstantial, enigmatic, doubtful, and elusive these were: ‘absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery’ (LJ 216). Tellingly, it was ‘impossible to see [Jim] clearly’ (LJ 339). Nothing has ultimate value and explanation is impossible. ‘Facts’ themselves are dialogic and unfinalizable, elastic and relative. They can be tinged with romance and mystery. They are romantic just as men of science are capable of dreaming and capable of ‘all the exalted elements of romance’ (LJ 217). As Marlow himself realized, the romantic Jim really existed for a fact: ‘his imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with an irresistible force!’ (LJ 216). Recalling Stein’s words, Marlow concludes that Jim ‘was romantic, but none the less true’ (LJ 334). Marlow even comes close to admitting that Jim existed because he was romantic as Stein’s rhetorical question suggests: ‘What is it that for you and me makes him – exist’ (LJ 216)? Romance or glamour and the fact of one’s existence can go hand in hand as Stein attests meaningfully: ‘Well – I exist, too’ (LJ 217). Romance (or fiction) is set up as an alternative and even complementary reality, episteme, consciousness, or language that contributes to a dialogic polyphony of multiple voices and multiple viewpoints. Daniel R. Schwarz has commented on how the ‘Stein episode teaches that there can be no one center of meaning in texts or in life. Just as neither Stein nor Jim can be the key to meaning for Marlow, so Marlow cannot be the source of meaning for his listeners; and, for us readers, no one character or scene can be privileged over the others’ (Schwarz, 2001: 89). However, Schwarz points out that the absence of ultimate meaning does not suggest that there cannot be ‘hierarchies of relative meaning’ (Schwarz, 2001: 89). On the whole, though, signs of Conrad’s subscription to colonial ‘facts’ and colonial meaning are


destabilized by suggestions within the text regarding the relativity and plurality of meaning and the inadequacy and obscurity of facts in and of themselves. All that remains finally is a fleeting ‘glimpse of truth’ (NB 20): the aim of art ... is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion ... To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile – such is the aim, difficult and evanescent ... And when [the task] is accomplished – behold! – all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile – and the return to an eternal rest. (NB 20, 22–3)

The jumble of facts and fiction Fernando had posed the question: What is the grammar of Conrad’s facts? How are we to find our way about and beyond them with any certainty? To put the problem bluntly, can the 900 [sic] Muslim pilgrims whose safety was in the balance in Lord Jim merely be an embellishment for the moral problem of a pleasant enough young Englishman? (Fernando, 1976: 78) Perhaps not; for starters, the Patna episode so central to Jim’s moral predicament and quest for redemption, necessitates an examination of the ‘facts’ of history. Firstly, that in the nineteenth century, steam power had overtaken sail and enabled many more Muslims in the Malay Archipelago to perform the haj or pilgrimage to Mecca. In this way, colonial communications had inadvertently revitalized the older network of the Pan-Islamic world through which traders, scholars, and missionaries had disseminated new knowledge, ideas, and attitudes since the thirteenth century. Secondly, that the port of the fateful ship’s embarkation, that barely disguised Eastern port of Singapore, was once a prominent hub in this world-wide web. T.N. Harper writes: In the nineteenth century, Singapore became a central locus for [the region’s tradition of intermigration and with it the spread of modernity]. For Malays, it contained relics of the Johor-Riau3 courtly culture. It was the centre of communications of the eastern Islamic world, a starting


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point for the haj and a refuge from the Dutch authorities. It was home to the mission presses and more importantly, in terms of what was read, to a network of Muslim publishers. (Harper, 1999: 21) These bits of information are not irrelevant to the story of Jim’s ascent to power in Patusan. European empires in the Malay Archipelago, as Harper tells us, drew much of their vitality from the Age of Commerce in Asia: its patterns of kingship and consumption, its models of universal religion, its scribes, traders and raiders. In Malaysia and the region, European empires were built on old sites of royal power and attempted to usurp their claims to universalism – Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore as a successor state to Malacca. And Europeans bought into Early Modern globalization and its networks of trade, by annexing local states or bringing them under the mantle of ‘Indirect Rule’. (Harper, 2001: 8) As such, the pilgrims under Jim’s charge stand for something larger than ‘dese cattle’ (LJ 15). They are markers of a new world order which had, among other things, imposed onto the precolonial regime a new image of authority and new structures of power and hegemony. They also bear testimony to the historical continuities of the Malay world, elements of which had survived for centuries and are still discernible to this day. The rest of this chapter focuses on the historical background of the Malay world and shows how the ‘facts’ of history are also traceable in Conrad’s fictional account. The difference between the two may lie in how these ‘facts’ are retold, historicized, or interpreted. Doubtless, Conrad’s fictional version incorporates many ‘facts’ that can be gleaned from other literatures/voices on the subject of the Malay but it also provides a surplus of seeing which goes beyond the limits of his narrators’ knowledge of these ‘facts’. I should stress that it is not my aim to test the accuracy of Conrad’s facts; such an endeavour is redundant given the relativity of all facts. What is more important for this book is to show that Conrad’s fictional intervention excavates the ironic undercurrents of colonialism, racial politics, expatriation, migration, and nationalism which other discourses neglect to delineate. In the same way, other versions of the past help to illuminate and enrich Conrad’s Eastern romances in that the complex interplay between historical data and art which emerges prompts us to interrogate the colonizing mission. This in turn serves to

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reveal the depth and complexity of Conrad’s irony. In my piecing together of the multiple ‘histories’ and discursive material available, I demonstrate the constructedness of my own Malay world narrative and ultimately, the constructedness of any narrative for that matter. Arguably, in the dialogics of Conrad’s Eastern fiction, four broad and interrelated historical themes which can be drawn from his ‘accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes’ (APR 15) stand out, namely, trade, politics, piracy, and Anglo-Dutch rivalry.

Trade, politics and Anglo-Dutch rivalry The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. The vices and the virtues of four nations have been displayed in the conquest of that region that even to this day has not been robbed of all the mystery and romance of its past – and the race of men who had fought against the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, has not been changed by the unavoidable defeat. (TR 3) The ‘scene of adventurous undertakings’ that the narrator of The Rescue speaks of has indeed witnessed the rise and fall of many maritime empires, both white and brown. It can be argued that the driving force behind this ebb and flow of political fortunes is trade. From ancient times, among the many myths circulating in the West about the Far East was that of the ‘Golden Khersonese’, or the Malay peninsula. This is attributed to early Greek and Byzantine Ptolemaic geographers who had imagined the region to be a fabulous treasure trove of gold4 deposits, even though in reality, the mineral which would eventually attract global attention and generate much wealth from as far back as the fifth century AD, was tin. There were, however, other equally fabled but more tangible treasures to be extracted from the Malay Archipelago – spices, for one. The thirteenth-century Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, in his travel accounts, had described where these spices could be found and awakened post-Dark Age Europe to the possibilities of a direct trade with Asia and especially with the Spice Islands or the Moluccas. The spice trade, long monopolized by Arabs and other Muslim traders (who were part of an extensive trading network stretching from the Spice Islands to the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean), was coveted by the Portuguese, who also sought mercantile supremacy over Venice, which up till that


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time was the main supplier of Asian spices in Europe. Indeed, the fabled Spice Islands and the lucrative spice trade which began in the sixteenth century had lured not just European ships but also American ones. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the port city of Melaka on the south-western coast of the Malay peninsula was positively humming with merchants and commercial transactions. It became the principal port of the archipelago and was prized by Europe for its strategic location along the legendary spice route. Changing hands in this major Asian entrepôt were the precious commodities demanded by an insatiable Europe as well as by other parts of the world. At the time of the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511, there existed a thriving polyglot market safely ensconced in the harbour city with a substantial Gujerati community and other Indians, as well as Javanese, Arab, and Chinese trading communities. Aside from Melaka, other parts of the resource-rich Malay Archipelago were also renowned for their immense commercial potential and flourishing trading centres. The ever-burgeoning China trade had seen a growing Chinese demand for jungle and marine products since at least the fifth century AD. In fact, it was about this time that goods and luxury items from western Asia, mostly transported overland in what was called the ‘Persian trade’, began to be shipped along sea routes. Malay vessels played a crucial part in the trans-shipment of these goods to China, thereby creating an important trans-Asiatic link with the China market. Gradually, goods from the mineral-rich and rainforest-clad islands and peninsula of the Nan Yang (southern oceans) grew attractive to the Chinese and could even compete with Persian perfumes and incense. In exchange for beeswax, rattans, resins, tortoiseshell, ivory, trepang (sea slug), birds’ nests, aromatic woods, corals, camphor, pepper, seaweed, and tin, the Chinese traders would unload porcelain pottery, silk, lacquerware, and other luxury items. By the time of the British and Dutch participation in the China trade and the European conquest of much of the Malay Archipelago, the list of bartered items for local and overseas consumption had grown to include cash crops like coffee, tobacco, sugar, tapioca, sago, and rice. In addition to this flurry of mercantile activity, since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the European demand for Chinese tea and porcelains alone had greatly enhanced the hugely profitable China trade. By the mid-nineteenth century, gutta-percha and antinomy from the Malay Archipelago were much in demand in Europe and were traded for Indian opium and textiles. In Almayer’s Folly, there are passages which evoke this commercial heritage: ‘[Dain] said he was a trader, and sold rice. He did not want to

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buy gutta-percha or beeswax, because he intended to employ his numerous crew in collecting trepang on the coral reefs outside the river, and also in seeking for birds’ nests on the mainland’ (AF 57). In the opening pages of the novel, Almayer’s reverie brings him back to his days in Macassar: ‘At that time Macassar was teeming with life and commerce’ (AF 6). The port city was also the stamping ground of influential country traders like Lingard, who is not only a businessman but also a gunrunner. Lingard is said to have discovered a river and up that river, he ‘used to take his assorted cargo of Manchester goods, brass gongs, rifles and gunpowder. ... Many tried to follow him and find that land of plenty for gutta-percha and rattans, pearl shells and birds’ nests, wax and gumdammar’ (AF 8). G.J. Resink describes the flow of goods during the period: The international trade carried on across the seas between ... islands and realms outside Java, in a world where there were still few if any Western agricultural or mining enterprises, picked up high-quality market products – gold and diamonds, rattan and beeswax, pepper and edible bird’s nests, pearl-shells and trepang, gutta-percha, dammar, and other forest products – and brought in primarily textiles, rice, and guns and ammunition, the latter making it possible to war against the Dutch at many places in the archipelago. (Resink, 1968: 321) To be sure, this commodity exchange also led to cross-cultural contacts and Lakamba’s hand-organ, a gift from ‘the white captain’ (AF 88), which plays arias from Verdi’s Il Trovatore incongruously ‘on the great silence over the river and forest’ is a fitting symbol of this early modern globalization and the vast extent of trading networks and relations in the archipelago. Furthermore, Lingard’s quest for gold in the interior of Borneo does not seem like a fool’s dream considering the largely untapped heartlands and how, on western Borneo, gold mines had been worked by the Chinese since the early nineteenth century (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 139). Human activity seemed to concentrate on the littoral and riverine regions that in Lord Jim, Marlow wonders ‘if Celebes may be said to have an interior’ (LJ 205). One of these commodities, gutta-percha, is notable for its importance to an industrial Europe. The raw material is symptomatic of modernity in which technological advances in steam, print, and telegraph would revolutionize communications. Gutta-percha was the only substance that could protect submarine telegraph cables. Conrad would fashion his Nelson or Nielson5 of ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ as a pre-modern


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figure: ‘He had come out East long before the advent of telegraph cables’ (TLS 147). Patusan is ‘far from the beaten tracks of the sea and from the ends of submarine cables’ (LJ 307). The narrator of An Outcast of the Islands decries industrial modernity as the destroyer of the sea’s mystery: That was the sea before the time when the French mind set the Egyptian muscle in motion and produced a dismal but profitable ditch.6 Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless steamboats was spread over the restless mirror of the Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends. The mystery was destroyed. (OI 12) In ‘The End of the Tether’, the narrator bemoans the aftermath of the opening of the Suez Canal, which marked the end of the enterprising and pioneering spirit embodied by Captain ‘Dare-devil’ Harry Whalley of the famous clipper the Condor and the fading of Whalley’s star: The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen. (Y 168) Nonetheless, Resink writes that during Conrad’s sojourn in the East, steam shipping had not yet dominated the seas of Southeast Asia, constituting less than 30 percent of the Indies merchant fleet: ‘It is not out of romantic preference that Conrad’s seascapes are adorned by sailing ships, but out of realistic knowledge of the maritime situation prevailing in the archipelago. In keeping with the actual facts, only the Dutch Navy is early fitted out with steamships’ (Resink, 1968: 318). Eventually however, with the shortening of the distance between East and West and with speedier steamers, trading in the Malay Archipelago intensified. In Victory, the individual traders grumble about the Tropical Belt Coal Company on Samburan which would result in a ‘great invasion of steamers’ (V 24). It is hardly surprising that many of Conrad’s principal Malays and Europeans are private traders or employees of local trading houses. Historically and fictionally, John Company and Jan Compagnie would not be able to separate trade from war, for the quest for monopolies, trading rights, and exclusive markets would often involve the use of

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brute force and gunboats. Trade was also the lifeline of Malay rulers and nobility and very often led to conflict. In addition to the Lingards and Hudigs of the archipelago, the Bugis are portrayed as a people for whom commerce and conflict were inseparable. In The Rescue, Conrad’s narrator sizes up Pata Hassim and Immada in relation to the mercantile, ruling classes of the Bugis kingdom of Wajo: They were natives of Wajo and it is a common saying amongst the Malay race that to be a successful traveller and trader a man must have some Wajo blood in his veins. ... a man who, of noble birth and perhaps related to the ruler of his own country, wanders over the seas in a craft of his own and with many followers; [he] carries from island to island important news as well as merchandise; [he] who may be trusted with secret messages and valuable goods; a man who, in short, is as ready to intrigue and fight as to buy and sell. Such is the ideal trader of Wajo. (TR 67–8) The ‘ideal trader of Wajo’ is one like Hassim, who has not only trade but also politics and insurgency on his mind: Trading, thus understood, was the occupation of ambitious men who played an occult but important part in all those national risings, religious disturbances, and also in the organized piratical movements on a large scale which, during the first half of the last century, affected the fate of more than one native dynasty and, for a few years at least, seriously endangered the Dutch rule in the East. (TR 68)7 Sweeping as this statement may sound even for a work of fiction, there is a historical grain of truth in it. In the Malay world, native dynasties flourished on trade in so far as it meant the accumulation of wealth and followers, and ‘organized piratical movements on a large scale’ were sometimes seen as a normal extension of this trade. Conrad’s fidelity to historical facts aside, his fictional treatment of the Wajo in The Rescue suggests how precarious and fragile the native state’s political position was as unenlightened intruders represented by a naïve Mrs Travers could well upset the delicate balance of local politics. Politics in the archipelago is the story of seaborne empires founded on trade. Malay world history tells the story of the rise and fall of entrepôt-kingdoms like Srivijaya8 and Melaka and others like Brunei


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which had also attempted to emulate or assume the prestige and power of earlier entities: Because the long coastlines surrounding the Malay archipelago provided many natural harbours which could act as collecting points, rivalry inevitably grew up between different ports vying for trading supremacy. Periodically one would establish itself as a regional entrepôt with the right to command the patronage of foreign merchants. As such a port asserted commercial hegemony, its neighbours had to accept their position as subsidiary collection centres feeding the entrepôt. The maintenance of this relationship depended on the ability of the centre to hold together a number of scattered harbours by loose political and economic ties which both vassal and overlord recognized as mutually advantageous. When the vassals began to question the value of the benefits they received, links with the overlord were weakened. The region would then break up into a number of small kingdoms again competing for supremacy until one again succeeded in asserting its pre-eminence. It is this ebb and flow of power which has been called the ‘rhythm’ of Malay history. (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 35) The Majapahit empire in the fourteenth century was a dominant power in the Straits and Malay Archipelago. But even the ingenuity, astuteness, and foresight of the prime minister, Gajah Mada (d.1364),9 could not prevent the collapse of this Hindu civilization and commercial powerhouse at the close of the century, soon after his death. It is this birth-decay rhythm which led historians to note a kind of momentum in the region. When the Portuguese, Dutch, and British intruded into this tradition of seaborne empires, they found it advantageous to view themselves as successors and inheritors of indigenous political paradigms in which a powerful entrepôt-state may control a vast network of vassal-states and monopolize the commercial activities of the surrounding seas and islands. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826), the avid historian and empire-builder, was quick to grasp this historical rhythm and construed British expansionism as yet another wave in the alternating vicissitudes of the Malay world history. After the Napoleonic wars in 1816, Britain had to return all Dutch colonies in the East Indies back to the Netherlands,10 a turn of events which disappointed Raffles,

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whose vision of London’s role in the East11 is somewhat akin to that of the other empire-builders of Majapahit, Srivijaya, Melaka, and their heirs and imitators. Britain, he felt, ‘was destined to take on the role of overlord in the archipelago in the tradition of great kingdoms of earlier times’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 110). His determination to establish a British entrepôt along the all-important sea route to China eventually drew him to Singapore, and the rest, as they say, ‘is history’. When the British were appointed to safeguard Dutch possessions in the region, he had proposed that the British legitimize their new regime by ‘[declaring] the British governor successor to the kings of Majapahit’ (Vlekke, 1946: 142). Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, the British attempted to impose a Western-type stability and order onto an ancient heritage of changing political fortunes: To nineteenth-century observers, ... a situation where various rulers were attempting to assert their independence or supremacy appeared ‘chaotic’ and symptomatic of the ‘decay’ besetting the Malay world. It was therefore with the claim of ‘restoring order’ to the area that the British came to justify their intervention in Malay affairs. But an examination of events in the Malay world in the eighteenth century indicates that such rationalization ignores the cyclical pattern of alternating unity and fragmentation which had characterized MalayIndonesian commerce and politics for well over a thousand years. (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 76) History demonstrates that the centre seldom holds. Centres shift, as demonstrated by the move from Palembang (the birthplace of Melaka’s founder, a Palembang prince) to Melaka and finally – with the advent of Western enterprise – to Dutch Batavia, and British Singapore. The key difference between a Western power and an Eastern one lies in the relationship between vassal and overlord. For instance, to reciprocate the protection offered by the dominant power, aquatic peoples or the Orang Laut entered the fold of the Melaka-Malays and pledged allegiance to the Melaka sultanate. Nevertheless, the relationship between the centre and the periphery was based on economic benefits and reciprocity rather than political submission or conquest: In order to participate fully and most profitably in international trade, the aquatic populations realised the necessity of acquiring a lord on land who would be the visible symbol of authority of a


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particular port. But entering into such a relationship with a coastal ruler was by no means regarded as an act of submission, but rather as one of equality dictated by economic motives. (Karim, 2002: 22) Thus, the crucial differences between an indigenous power and a European one would lie not only in the notions of boundaries and statehood, which were nonexistent to the former, but also in the extent of ‘control’ exercised by the centre over its vassals diffused far and wide. Vassal states regarded as trading ‘partners’ by indigenous empires were treated as trading ‘subjects’ by Western empires. When the Europeans usurped the sea states of preceding empires and their global trading networks, they too began by consolidating a centre (usually port metropolises combining authority over land and sea) and extending its influence. In the Dutch case, the non-interference policy was often accompanied by ‘the ideal of future conquest’ (Resink, 1968: 311). Armed with superior military hardware and spurred by developments in Europe including intense economic rivalry, the scramble for trade with the Chinese, and the Napoleonic wars, it can be argued that the Europeans succeeded in stemming the ‘rhythm’ of Malay history. It can be argued that Conrad’s depiction of an archipelago that is in a state of flux and populated by all manner of exiles, fugitives, and diasporic, transnational peoples, is an attempt to capture this sense of ‘rhythm’ before it vanishes completely as a result of European colonialism, preferring to recognize this unique feature as characteristic of ‘the mystery and romance of [the Malay Archipelago’s] past’ (TR 3). Indeed, the reality of British dominance and expansion in the nineteenth century is the stuff of both history and fiction. So unstoppable was its forward movement that the narrator of The Rescue declares: ‘To-morrow the advancing civilization will obliterate the marks of a long struggle in the accomplishment of its inevitable victory’ (TR 3). Territorially, the British controlled the Straits Settlements (Melaka, Penang, and Singapore), the Protected Malay States (subsequently reinvented as the Federated Malay States in 1896), Sarawak (through Rajah James Brooke (1803–68)), and North Borneo (ruled by the chartered company, the British Borneo Company, they ‘who knew how to develop a rich country’ [AF 36], which in Almayer’s Folly failed to materialize in Berau). It is significant that Conrad’s fictional locales (Sambir/Berau, Patusan, Batu Beru, Pulau Tujuh, Carimata, and so on) lie mostly outside British and Dutch jurisdiction, in places where the traditional sociopolitical structure was, in all probability, still extant in its entirety. Babalatchi’s position as a court dignitary (Prime Minister) in the palace of the Rajah of Sambir, supports this. In Lord Jim, the spectre of British Residential Rule


looms over Patusan as the era of the white rajah/lord’s rule over his private realm was also fast becoming an anachronism. The mystery of ‘that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea’ which ‘seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma’ (LJ 336) is as ‘short-lived’ as illusion, ‘that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone’ (LJ 225). Britain, spearheaded by Raffles and other empire builders, had entered the political arena of the Malay world only to compete with other imperial forces, both European and non-European, for commercial and political dominance. Intermittently, Siamese kingdoms had been overlords over the northern Malay states for centuries; Melaka itself was a former vassal state of the Ayudhya king. In the nineteenth century, Britain was caught in a complex and delicate diplomatic tussle with the Siamese Chakri dynasty for the control of northern Malay peninsular states. To exacerbate the uncertain situation further, the presence of the Germans, French, and Spanish in the vicinity did not augur well for Britain or the Netherlands. Earlier, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 182412 had conveniently carved the Malay Archipelago into two so-called spheres of influence along the Malacca Straits, ‘this highway of the Far East’ (Y 166). The Netherlands would keep to her possessions of Java, Sumatra, and the islands south of Singapore, while Britain would retain the peninsula. Borneo’s future was as yet uncertain, as far as this treaty and Anglo-Dutch rivalry were concerned, and the stage seemed set for the white rajah James Brooke to make his spectacular appearance and attain his immense victory as mirrored in Lord Jim: ‘Immense! No doubt it was immense; the seal of success upon his words, the conquered ground for the soles of his feet, the blind trust of men, the belief in himself snatched from the fire, the solitude of his achievement’ (LJ 272). Brooke left Sarawak for the last time in 1863, anxious to dispose of his kingdom to the highest bidder, and in this respect, differs from Jim, who pledges never to leave his people and dreads what it would be like if he were to leave: ‘but only try to think what it would be if I went away ... Hell loose ... I shall be faithful’ (LJ 333–4). Conrad’s abiding interest in Borneo was inspired by the figure of Brooke and the government of Sarawak (a territory on northwestern Borneo) that Brooke had acquired for himself from the Sultan of Brunei in 1841. Certainly, he drew inspiration from Brooke’s life for Lord Jim and The Rescue. In a letter to Lady Margaret Brooke, Dowager Ranee of Sarawak, he wrote: The first Rajah Brooke has been one of my boyish admirations, a feeling I have kept to this day strengthened by the better understanding


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of the greatness of his character and the unstained rectitude of his purpose. The book which has found favour in your eyes has been inspired in a great measure by the history of the first Rajah’s enterprise and even by the lecture of his journals as partly reproduced by Captain Mundy and others. Even the very name of the messenger whom you so sympathetically appreciate was taken from that source. ... It was never my good fortune to see Kuching; and indeed my time in the Archipelago was short, though it left most vivid impressions and some highly valued memories. (CL 7: 137–8) Echoes of Brooke, who in many ways is the embodiment of the pioneering, entrepreneurial, and resourceful spirit of empire, can be detected in characters like Lord Jim, ‘Rajah Laut’ Lingard, Captain Whalley, Stein, and perhaps even Marlow himself. Interestingly, Brooke’s military allies in the form of Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane and Captain Henry Keppel (1809–1904) who helped him in the war against piracy were each recognized as ‘Rajah Laut’ or King of the Sea by the local population (Mundy, 1848, 2: 110, 192; Reece, 2004: 41). Lingard and Shaw discuss the exploits of Sir Thomas in dealing with the vagabonds, with Shaw asking: ‘I thought all this was over and done for ... since Sir Thomas Cochrane swept along the Borneo coast with his squadron some years ago. He did a rare lot of fighting – didn’t he?’ (TR 23). In the Lingard trilogy, direct allusions are made to the English Rajah of Sarawak. Babalatchi reminisces bitterly: ‘Even I have sailed with Lanun men, and boarded in the night silent ships with white sails. That was before an English Rajah ruled in Kuching’ (AF 206). In Lord Jim, the fictional Patusan is modelled after the pirate stronghold mentioned in Brooke’s journals and the armed conflict between Jim and Sherif Ali is transmuted into the battle between Brooke and the pirates threatening his newfound realm: Sheriff Sahib is now fortified at a place called Patusan (or the cut), in the Sakarran river. We are waiting impatiently for the Dido, and probably the Phlegethon steamer, when we shall drive him away from the scene of his iniquities, ... the influence of these sheriffs must be entirely broken, and their persons banished ... It must be borne in mind, that all these sheriffs are of Arab extraction; and if we refer to Sir Stamford Raffles, we shall gain the opinion of that high authrority regarding the Arabs, and the evil influence they exercise in Malay states. (Mundy, 1848, 1: 374–6)

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Conrad’s response to the history of Brooke’s exploits is complex: while there is a clear admiration for the adventurer and monarch-of-all-hesurveyed type, there is also an impulse to memorialize the forgotten legions of ‘obscure adventurers’, ‘common crowd of seamen-traders’ (TR 4) who actually helped local rebels to fight their wars against each other and against the European interlopers by supplying the former with arms and thus ‘if they emerged from their obscurity it was only to be condemned as law-breakers’ (TR 4) and not heroes. These adventurertraders also ‘[belong] to history’ (TR 4) as I will discuss shortly. More significantly, Conrad also chooses to focus, through and alongside the experiences of Jim, Lingard, Marlow and other white protagonists, the ‘brown nations’ (Y 41) who are the dispossessed and displaced exiles in their own world and who ‘have kept to this day their love of liberty, their fanatical devotion to their chiefs, their blind fidelity in friendship and hate – all their lawful and unlawful instincts’ (TR 3). These brown nations are not necessarily diminished by their perceived ‘unlawful instincts’. As Gene Moore observes, ‘The brown characters in Conrad’s Malay fictions have better eyesight than their white masters ... [and] also possess far greater insight into the political realities of their situation’ (Moore, 2007a: 23). In any case, Brooke’s history provided Conrad with a great many ideas. For one thing, Brooke was not unlike Raffles in his dream of reinventing the Malay polity so as to benefit both the English East India Company (EIC)13 traders and the natives of Sarawak. He is described in Conrad’s tales thus: a true adventurer in his devotion to his impulse – a man of high mind and of pure heart, lay the foundation of a flourishing state on the ideas of pity and justice. He recognized chivalrously the claims of the conquered; he was a disinterested adventurer, and the reward of his noble instincts is in the veneration with which a strange and faithful race cherish his memory. Misunderstood and traduced in life, the glory of his achievement has vindicated the purity of his motives. He belongs to history. (TR 4) By ‘[m]isunderstood and traduced in life’, Conrad is alluding to the accusations directed at Brooke for his alleged mishandling of the piracy question. The high number of casualties on the native side, the severity of the battles, and the monetary reward given out by Singapore’s Admiralty Court for each pirate ‘head’ created a great outcry in Parliament. In 1853, a Commission of Enquiry held in Singapore


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interrogated him on his anti-piracy campaigns against the Saribas, Rejang, and Sekrang Sea Dayaks or Ibans. However, reports, real or distorted, of massacres and heavy-handed attacks, did not seriously undermine the Brooke regime which continued to rule Sarawak right through the Second World War. Images of Jim’s cross-examination before the inquiry after the Patna episode come to mind with the difference that while Brooke was completely exonerated (although suffering irreparable damage to his reputation), Jim’s mariner’s certificate was cancelled and his redemption would come hot in the heels of a daring fight with the rebels, robbers, and tyrants of Patusan. At times, Kuching’s relationship with London might seem awkward especially since London was reluctant to recognize Brooke as the sovereign ruler of Sarawak until 1863, but there was very little doubt that Brooke and Britain were no strange bedfellows. Sarawak’s role in asserting the British sphere of influence would be critical because of its position on the trade route to China and the threatening encroachment of other foreign powers in the region. The strife that afflicted the fictional Patusan before Jim’s intervention sums up not only the rivalries between warring factions in a native state but also the disputes between the main European powers in the region: ‘Of course the quarrels were for trade’ (LJ 256). Almayer’s Folly illustrates some of these strategic undercurrents and the sphere-of-influence diplomacy. The novel’s narrative time-frame itself is probably the mid- to late 1880s when the Brooke regime was already well underway and the British government had officially included north Borneo under its sphere. The tentative move on southeast Borneo by the ‘British Borneo Company’ in the novel was probably thwarted by the decision to avoid treading on the toes of the Dutch, whose authority had begun to creep over that part of the island. Nevertheless, the extent of Dutch authority was only nominal, as Conrad has his Almayer retort to his visiting Dutch officials: ‘You have no grip on this country’ (AF 138). Allegiance to the Dutch entailed only the flying of the Dutch Flag, and Dutch authority took the form of patrolling naval gun boats, the enforcement of the ban on the sale of firearms to native individuals, and the prohibition of slavery: The claim to that part of the East Coast was abandoned, leaving the Pantai river under the nominal power of Holland. In Sambir there was joy and excitement. The slaves14 were hurried out of sight into the forest and jungle, and the flags were run up the tall poles in the Rajah’s compound in expectation of a visit from Dutch man-of-war boats. (AF 34)

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Dain Maroola’s dubious and furtive trade, we later learn, is the illegal purchase of gunpowder from Almayer, with Lakamba himself ‘too deeply implicated in the gunpowder smuggling to care for an investigation by the Dutch authorities into that matter’ (AF 81). Much of this romance demonstrates a fidelity to the historical ‘facts’. As such, Conrad’s fictional East may not be classified as conventional history but historical experts like Resink appreciate its contribution to the socio-cultural historiography of the Malay world as well as its historical accuracy. In the nineteenth century, Dutch strongholds were actually limited to Java, and the Spanish to the Philippines, whereas the British were steadily gaining more and more footholds on the Malay states of the peninsula as well as Borneo. Historically speaking, anti-Dutch feelings in Bali (Dain Maroola’s realm) and Sumatra are accurate because these islands fall within the Dutch sphere of influence. Borneo’s own position with regard to the treaty of 1824 was never clear but on the east coast where Berau/Brow is situated, the Dutch held nominal sway. Thus, when Mrs Almayer says to Nina the future queen of Bali, ‘When I hear of white men driven from the islands, then I shall know that you are alive’ (AF 152), she is likely referring to Orang Blanda (Dutchmen). Maroola himself is on the run from the Dutch, after having been ‘sent off by his father, the independent Rajah of Bali, at the time when the hostilities between Dutch and Malays threatened to spread from Sumatra over the whole archipelago’ (AF 81). Nevertheless, it would serve us well to be reminded that, as nineteenth-century Dutch colonial writer Multatuli (1820–87; Eduard Douwes Dekker) writes in his novel, Max Havelaar (which Conrad had read), ‘to the natives, every white man is an orang hollanda, wolanda, belanda, indiscriminately’ (Dekker, 1982: 332). Belanda is metonymic of whiteness. The difference between Belanda and Ingris (English) is only known by those who have a stake in the political situation and are capable of playing off one European nation against the other. These include Hassim, Karain, Dain Maroola, and the other rajahs, sultans, Karaengs, Daengs, and chieftains of the Malay Archipelago. Yet another notable fact of history in Conrad’s fiction is his portrayal of the influential European private country traders who practically combed the waters of the Malay Archipelago. Nelson, for example, had been one of us for years, trading and sailing in all directions through the Eastern Archipelago, across and around, transversely, diagonally, perpendicularly, in semi-circles, and zigzags, and figures


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of eights, for years and years. There was no nook or cranny of these tropical waters that the enterprise of old Nelson (or Nielsen) had not penetrated in an eminently pacific way. His tracks, if plotted out, would have covered the map of the Archipelago like a cobweb – all of it, with the sole exception of the Philippines. (TLS 147–8) These English country traders, a corps of private and Company merchants, were engaged in port-to-port trading within the region. From the eighteenth century onwards, the English private country traders or British free merchants became major competitors to the Dutch and, defying Dutch prohibition on the sale of armaments, posed a threat to Dutch influence. Among their cargoes were gunpowder, armaments, and other contraband so that ‘if [these traders] emerged from their obscurity it was only to be condemned as law-breakers’ (TR 4). These ‘English adventurers were also willing to trade their knowledge of the manufacture of gunpowder and cannon and thus exploit the Malay desire for acquisition of arms denied them by VOC policies’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 101). The VOC is the Dutch East India Company, one among many European East India Companies trading in the East. In Conrad’s fiction, gun-running and other illicit activities do not exclusively signify a distinct anticolonial sentiment among the natives. They also reflect the turbulence characteristic of the Malay Archipelago where internecine civil wars, succession disputes, colonial invasions, and subsequent migrations had been the rule of the day for centuries. The need to protect one’s piece of the economic pie or to bump up one’s revenues necessitated equipping oneself with arms. Jörgenson’s command, the barge Emma, a floating arsenal, is perhaps symbolic of the role of the country traders in deciding the destiny of more than one petty kingdom. The spotlight on Makassar in the opening pages of Almayer’s Folly is historically significant. Not only was it the embarkation port from which fleets of Bugis and Makassar emigrants/refugees sailed off in search of greener pastures, but it had the notoriety of being the smuggling centre of the archipelago. English country traders frequented Makassar in the course of their business, legitimate or otherwise. In Almayer’s Folly, Almayer’s memory of Makassar is that of a country traders’ hub: At that time Macassar was teeming with life and commerce. It was the point in the islands where tended all those bold spirits who, fitting out schooners on the Australian coast, invaded the Malay Archipelago


in search of money and adventure. Bold, reckless, keen in business, not disinclined for a brush with the pirates that were to be found on many a coast as yet, making money fast, they used to have a general ‘rendezvous’ in the bay for purposes of trade and dissipation. The Dutch merchants called these men English pedlars; ... the acknowledged king of them all was Tom Lingard, he whom the Malays, honest or dishonest, quiet fishermen or desperate cut-throats, recognized as ‘the Rajah-Laut’ – the King of the Sea. (AF 6–7) Bernard Vlekke tells us that Makassar was once ‘that great centre of the smuggling trade in spices’ (Vlekke, 1946: 100). Indeed, for a very long time, it was the principal gateway through which cloves were smuggled out from the Moluccas. It is to their credit that, despite their constant molestation by Batavia, English country traders proved resilient and unfazed. During the 1730s, for example, intra-Asian trade took on added urgency when the demand for tea from China intensified the competition between the EIC and the VOC. As Nicholas Tarling notes: The British had the advantage in Canton, however, and also in their command of Indian opium and textiles for distribution in the Archipelago, and the Country Traders were thus able to defeat the Dutch attempts at exclusion, to infringe more easily the Dutch contracts, and even to invade the spice monopolies. In particular they made Riau, a part of the old Malay empire of Johore over which the Dutch had no effective control, a centre for the smuggling of opium and textiles from India, of tin and other goods for the China market, and of spices for Europe; and they were aided by the commercial activities of the Bugis of Celebes, who had reacted against the Dutch conquest of Macassar by making themselves the great traders of the Archipelago. (Tarling, 1962: 3–4) Banned from Makassar, the English country traders very quickly regrouped by making Riau (Rhio to Conrad15) their new centre of operations. In An Outcast of the Islands, we read about how the ‘Nakhodas of the rare trading praus ... wagged their heads gravely over the recital of Orang Blanda exaction, severity, and general tyranny, as exemplified in the total stoppage of gunpowder trade and the rigorous visiting of all suspicious craft trading in the straits of Macassar’ (OI 48). Blockade and gun-running activities survived through the nineteenth century and Conrad’s Jackson, Hollis, Lingard, Ford, Davidson, Morrison, Whalley,


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Jasper Allen, Marlow, Jim, and even Willems belong to this league of country traders (regardless of whether they were employed by the Company or by Chinese and Arabian firms or were privateers like Lingard, or whether they were dealing with contraband, piece-goods, and so on). In ‘Karain: A Memory’, the country traders’ role takes on an amazing twist indeed. In the tale, fiction dialogues with history by suggesting that although the alliance between the country trader and the Bugis-Malay borders ironically on the supernatural and occult, it is the European friend who is left with unsettling doubts about the truth and validity of his tangible, civilized world, a point I take up in the next chapter. For the Bugis, civil unrest, Dutch threats, and dynastic disputes had rocked their world in the nineteenth century, contributing further to the Bugis diaspora. In ‘Karain: A Memory’, the Bugis war-chief Karain is an exile from his native country, ‘a small Bugis state on the island of Celebes’ (TU 14), who ‘[s]ome ten years ago ... had led his people – a scratch lot of wandering Bugis – to the conquest of the bay’ (TU 8). Lingard’s friendship with Hassim is expressed in terms of trading connections and loyalties between country traders and Bugis traders: ‘To trade with friends’ (TR 76). This friendship is also sealed in terms of gunpowder: ‘I have had three barrels of powder put on board your prau’ (TR 76). The demand for weaponry and ammunition, to be sure, was not merely meant for succession or tribal wars but also for the assertion of power and independence from the Dutch. Images of Jim spearheading the Bugis attack on Sherif Ali with cannon and powder; the three gunrunners selling rifles and powder to Karain; Jörgenson advising the chiefs of Manangkabo and dealing with Javanese and Sumatran monarchs and chieftains; Lingard attempting to reinstate Pata Hassim, ‘the nephew of one of the greatest chiefs of Wajo’ (TR 69) as the rightful heir to the Wajo throne; Stein’s marriage to a Bugis princess and his close associations with the ruling house; all these testify to the considerable influence wielded by the English country traders (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 100) to the extent that the Dutch would condemn them as piffling ‘Vordamte English pedlars’ (TR 96) and even post spies to gather intelligence on their covert activities. In ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, ‘English Jasper’ is contemptuously regarded by the Dutch as a ‘pedlar’ (TLS 171). The point Conrad makes here may be that, for the Bugis, the English make better friends than the Dutch; however, the core fact remains: ‘the advancing civilization’ (TR 3) and ‘the conquering race’ (Y 42) which has preyed on the ‘[t]heir country of land and water’16 is ‘the western race’ (TR 3), which includes the British. In any case, Lingard’s return to England never to return again is, in a way, an indication that the role once played


by the corps of country adventurer-traders ‘belongs to history’ (TR 4). Almayer’s folly, which is to yearn for a Fatherland he has never known, marks the termination of Lingard’s legacy even as the burning down of the office of Lingard and Co. marks the passing away of a phase of life. The failures and tragedies of Conrad’s ‘Tuan Putih’, from the hero Jim to the antihero Almayer, seem to reflect a moral inadequacy that nullifies any noble colonial intention of ‘rescuing’ the Malays from degeneracy and indeed suggest that, given the tenuous nature of civilized values, there is no white lord who can truly succeed in ruling the Malays.

Piracy and politics ‘Yes. A man of the sea – even as we are. A true Orang Laut’, went on Babalatchi, thoughtfully, ‘not like the rest of the white men’. (OI 222) In his study of slavery and racism in Conrad’s Eastern world, Gene Moore observes that ‘[c]olonialism in Conrad’s Malay world is not only a conflict among Western powers for Eastern resources, but also a complex political struggle involving stateless ethnic groups competing against one another’ (Moore, 2007a: 21). Underscoring the novels as ‘sources of ethnographic evidence concerning fugitive peoples relegated to the margins of empires’ (Moore, 2007a: 22), Moore examines an important theme in Conrad’s Malay fictions: ethnic survival in a climate of colonial hostility and the inevitable displacement and dispossession that render communities like the Bugis, Sulu, and Iranun fugitives and refugees in their own world. Historians have also commented on how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this volatile condition coupled with succession disputes and civil wars (construed as ‘decay’ by nineteenth-century observers), European interference in local politics, Dutch monopoly treaties, the huge demand for slaves,17 and the establishment of Singapore, had led to the demise of the Malay entrepôt state and Malay commercial hegemony (of which Melaka is the model) as well as large scale marauding expeditions which took place during the infamous ‘ “pirate season,” the musim Ilanun’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 109). The slave-raiding pirates Moore discusses in his study are the Iranun from the Sulu zone, who were renowned as pirates (‘Lanun’ or ‘Illanoon’, derived from Iranun) of the Malay world. To be sure, piracy in Conrad’s Eastern tales18 goes well beyond its significance as trope. It points to a world in which western prejudice and eastern ways of life collided head on with devastating results. Pirates had roamed the seas of the Malay Archipelago for as long as maritime trading activities had existed. The orang laut, or sea people,


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who inhabited the islands and rivers in the western half of the archipelago were seasonal pirates who played a significant economic and political role in the history of the region, making up a tradition which is as old as the hills. In the days of Srivijaya, the orang laut were fiercely loyal to the emperor and served as the royal navy. Economically, ‘piracy in the Malay world had played a varied role, whether as a means of forcing trade into local ports or as a source of income for impoverished but ambitious princes’ and ‘[m]uch of this heritage lingered on into the nineteenth century’. To Malay chiefs, ‘piracy was an important source of revenue which enabled them to retain a large following, an acknowledged index of power in the Malay world’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 130–1). The Anglo-Dutch campaign against piracy and slave-raiding in the nineteenth century was so severe that livelihoods were destroyed and ways of life irrevocably altered for the orang laut ‘for whom trading and raiding had coexisted as part of a cultural heritage’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 132). In the Sulu Archipelago (which lies between Borneo and the Philippines), the chiefs of the Sulu Sultanate were slave-holders whose wealth was measured by the number of slaves they owned; Moore notes that ‘[t]he source of Sulu wealth and notoriety was identified with the very dignity and cultural identity of the Sulu people, so that the abolition of slavery seemed tantamount to cultural genocide’ (Moore, 2007a: 26). Together with the orang laut, the Sulu/Iranun raiders were the bane of colonial trade and shipping. Although Conrad’s stories take place largely in the post-piracy era, when characters speak of pirates and their escapades mainly in the past tense, the surviving practitioners and heirs of this tradition still look back with something like pride and nostalgia on the days when sea-robbers ruled the waters of the archipelago. Mrs Almayer is ‘the girl found in the pirate prau’, ‘that legacy of a boatful of pirates’ (AF 9, 10), and Babalatchi ‘was a vagabond of the seas, a true Orang-Laut, living by rapine and plunder of coasts and ships in his prosperous days’ (OI 51–2). In ‘The End of the Tether’, the sultan (grandfather of the current ruler) of Batu Beru had financed ‘a Balinini chief called Haji Daman’ (Y 287). The Balanini, also from the Sulu Archipelago, were formidable sea-robbers, ‘second only to the Illanuns in daring and ferocity’ (Rutter, 1986: 43). In An Outcast of the Islands, ‘the fearless Omar el Badavi’, was ‘the leader of Brunei rovers’ (OI 52). The narrator of The Rescue alludes to the dying of an age as a result of an earlier Dutch offensive against piracy: When, at the cost of much blood and gold, a comparative peace had been imposed on the islands the same occupation, though shorn of

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its glorious possibilities, remained attractive for the most adventurous of a restless race. The younger sons and relations of many a native ruler traversed the seas of the Archipelago, visited the innumerable and little-known islands, and the then practically unknown shores of New Guinea; every spot where European trade had not penetrated – from Aru to Atjeh, from Sumbawa to Palawan. (TR 68) As far as revenue was concerned, Malay rajahs did not distinguish between commerce and piracy: ‘The concern of Malay rulers, as reflected in Malay writings, was not with commerce but with wealth. The way in which wealth was obtained, be it by force, “legitimate trade”, monopoly, or even gambling or magic, was a relatively unimportant matter’ (Milner, 1977: 62). Wealth was crucial because it assured the ruler of the continued allegiance of his followers in an environment where mass migrations of people were not uncommon for reasons ranging from poverty to tribal wars or a ruler’s misdemeanour. The Bugis diaspora in the Malay Archipelago is an example of asylum/refuge-seeking, frail loyalties, the lure of greener pastures abroad, and general wanderlust. ‘Piracy’ in the waters of the Malay Archipelago was, as Conrad’s fiction suggests, a highly contentious issue with implications for international and maritime laws and where the dialectics of local and global would create new perceptions of piracy itself. Resink, in his meticulous mapping of Conrad’s Malay Archipelago alongside the history of Indonesia and in the context of international law, writes: ‘Piracy was a matter of international economics as well as international law, deriving as it did from the international shipping and trade which was maintained and conducted by Indonesians until they were gradually pushed aside by the Dutch and other Europeans from the eighteenth century onward’ (Resink, 1968: 317). Apparently, the first ruler of Melaka had been a pirate himself, plundering merchant ships sailing between India and the other parts of the archipelago, probably in an indirect bid to force traders to use his harbour and pay the customs duties and port levies. In any event, merchants found Melaka extremely well-situated along the trade route and it soon became a famed bustling commercial metropolis. Owen Rutter points out that as a result of the system of monopolies created by the Dutch, Chinese traders who had been doing business directly with the locals were gradually expelled from the archipelago, thus affecting the revenue of Malay rulers and their subjects. For Rutter, the Dutch and the British, with their high-handed policies, had ‘destroyed the authority of the rulers and disorganized the commercial


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enterprise of their people’; consequently, Piracy became looked upon as an honourable occupation, so that any chief who wished to improve his fortune could collect about him a handful of restless followers and settle with them upon some secluded island in the Archipelago; thence he could sail out to attack ships and villages. If he were successful he would gain fresh adherents soon enough; his settlement would become a little town, strongly fortified and stockaded, while his fleet would become large enough to be divided into several squadrons. (Rutter, 1986: 27–8) In 1696, Sir Charles Hedges, Judge of the English High Court of Admiralty, defined piracy in this way: Now piracy is only a sea term for robbery, piracy being a robbery committed within the jurisdiction of the Admiralty. If any man be assaulted within that jurisdiction, and his ship or goods violently taken away without legal authority, this is robbery and piracy. ... [this jurisdiction extends] to the most remote parts of the world; so that if any person whatsoever, native or foreigner, Christian or Infidel, Turk or Pagan, with whose country we have no war ... shall be robbed or spoiled in the Narrow Seas, the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Southern or any other seas ... either on this or the other side of the line,19 it is piracy within the limits of your enquiry and the cognizance of this court. (quoted in Rutter, 1986: 25) This law does not differentiate between buccaneers of the Spanish Main and pirates of the Malay Archipelago. In the legal and popular sense of the word, they were sea-robbers and therefore outlaws, pure and simple. The Malay pirate though, was strictly speaking, not a miscreant on his home turf: ‘[W]hile the buccaneer was an outlaw, with the hand of every nation against him, the Malay pirate chief was a prince who might range where he listed, taking what he would. Rulers would placate him and even come to do his bidding’ (Rutter, 1986: 24–5). In fact, raiding or looting (merampas) was often seen as a source of supplementary income for local chiefs. The campaign against piracy mounted by both Dutch and British authorities must still be going on in the earlier part of the historical period which overlaps with Conrad’s Eastern fiction (approximately between 1860 and 1915). By the 1870s piracy in peninsular waters had been effectively stamped out and by 1906 (the time of ‘Because of the


Dollars’), ‘the court cases and legal decisions regarding piracy disappeared from the law journals’ (Resink, 1968: 317). However, the presence of pirates in Lingard’s time is still historically correct since piracy was not entirely eradicated from the seas of the archipelago until after the turn of the twentieth century. More importantly, ex-pirates like Babalatchi were more commonly found throughout the archipelago, since ‘between 1835 and 1860, Malay piracy was almost ended, while even the Lanuns and Balanini were far less of a scourge than they had been’ (Mills, 2003: 266). This coincided with the time when steam largely overtook sail and helped to expedite the suppression of piracy. However, safer seas did not necessarily mean increased native shipping because the more powerful steamships would gradually destroy much of the precolonial commercial traditions of the Malays symbolized by their merchant fleets of sailing boats. As a whole, the historical timespan of Conrad’s Eastern stories captures a world in transition and flux, a ‘passing phase of life’ (NB 20) which bore witness to the residual existence of piracy as an accepted ‘traditional’ practice in precolonial times. Piracy in the Malay sense was incomprehensible to the Western juridical mind. How could it not carry similar connotations as a Western buccaneer? In any case, mirroring historical reality, many of Conrad’s pirates have long retired from their old jobs or been reduced to benign and harmless old men by the colonial endeavour to stamp out piracy. However, earlier in Lingard’s career, there were also those who prowled the coastal seas in search of loot and, more significantly, could be induced and rallied to bring about political change, as suggested in The Rescue. Daman, ‘the chief of the men of the sea’ (TR 421), ‘the supreme leader of the Illanuns’ (TR 289), is Lingard’s dubious co-conspirator in the plot to restore the exiled Rajah Hassim of Wajo to power. In Almayer’s Folly, Babalatchi, that wily statesman and fomenter of intrigue in Sambir, had beginnings as a seasonal rover: Babalatchi had blundered upon the river while in search of a safe refuge for his disreputable head. He was a vagabond of the seas, a true Orang-Laut, living by rapine and plunder of coasts and ships in his prosperous days; earning his living by honest and irksome toil when the days of adversity were upon him. So, although at times leading the Sulu rovers, he had also served as Serang of country ships, and in that wise had visited the distant seas, beheld the glories of Bombay, the might of the Mascati Sultan; had even struggled in a pious throng for the privilege of touching with his lips the Sacred Stone of the Holy City. (OI 51–2)


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Conrad’s Malay world is the scene of disenfranchised merchants, rulers, and pirates, and the anxiety and bitterness which results from being pushed out of existence is best expressed by one who has engaged in ‘the manly pursuits of throat-cutting, kidnapping, slave-dealing, and fire-raising, that were the only possible occupation for a true man of the sea’ (OI 52). At the end of Almayer’s Folly, Babalatchi confides in Ford: the old times were best. Even I have sailed with Lanun men, and boarded in the night silent ships with white sails. That was before an English Rajah ruled in Kuching. Then we fought among ourselves and were happy. Now when we fight with you we can only die! (AF 206) This last statement of the old pirate seems to suggest that even interethnic strife and civil wars did not lead to the total annihilation that he foresees will happen when his people take up arms against the new imperial masters of the archipelago. Indeed the long, relentless campaign against piracy had affected the sea peoples of the archipelago in far-reaching ways, to the point of wiping out a whole way of life. The gory and war-like attack on the pirates’ settlement in An Outcast of the Islands in which ‘that long career of murder, robbery and violence received its first serious check at the hands of white men’ (OI 52), is corroborated by the testimony of one orang laut: ‘An English warship fired on me, and my perahu was smashed to smithereens by bullets as big as husked coconuts’ (quoted in Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 132). The ‘bullets as big as husked coconuts’ are the same ‘bursting shells’ (OI 52) which destroyed the pirates’ stronghold in the novel. It is perhaps with some irony, that, despite the elimination of piracy by ‘the advancing civilization’, Conrad seems to emphasize that ‘the mystery and romance of [the Eastern] past’ is still intact and that ‘the race of men who had fought against the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, has not been changed by the unavoidable defeat’ (TR 3). To the extent that the anti-piracy campaign was also ‘a means of putting down any resistance to Europeans or any authority they supported’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 131), it is not too far-fetched to say that here Conrad hints that the ‘unchanged’ ‘pirates’ may rise again from the ashes in revolt against colonial subjugation. In ‘Karain: A Memory’, the narrator reads of reported unrest in the Eastern Archipelago: the few [of us] who survive are not yet so dim-eyed as to miss in the befogged respectability of their newspapers the intelligence of various

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native risings in the Eastern Archipelago. Sunshine gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs – sunshine and the glitter of the sea. (TU 3) Be that as it may, piracy as well as the ‘wasted lives’ of adventurer-traders of the archipelago ‘have tinged with romance the region of shallow waters and forest-clad islands, that lies far east, and still mysterious between the deep waters of two oceans’ (TR 4, emphasis added). The sunshine and dazzling sea between the lines of reportage in the passage above is an apt metaphor for the dialogic engagement of art and history in the quest for ‘that glimpse of truth’ (NB 20). In the discussion of the collusion and collision of history and fiction in Conrad’s Eastern works, one intriguing detail must detain us a little longer. Khoo Kay Kim describes how ‘Malay historiography up to the end of the nineteenth century was very much élitist in conception and political in tone. It was istana- or palace-orientated and often written upon the titah or command of the ruler’ (Khoo, 1991: 212) by the royal scribe. Many books focused on the genealogy of ruling families and were vital for the substantiation of claims of legitimacy and authority made by the ruler class. Traditionally, these historical accounts/stories or hikayat (mentioned briefly in the introductory chapter) were written in lofty and ornate styles and were considered literary (the hikayat was mainly written in prose but some were written in verse form and these were called syair). The Sejarah Melayu or ‘Malay Annals’ is the acknowledged masterpiece of Malay court annals; it was not written ‘according to the Western conception of a historical document, and to treat it as such is to misunderstand its fundamental aims’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 32).20 Indeed, as Khoo Kay Kim notes: ‘The term hikayat indeed tends to imply that in traditional Malay thinking history was not punctiliously distinguished from literature’ (Khoo, 1991: 211).21 This was especially true of works written before the eighteenth century. Ismail Hussein writes: Literature in the Malay Nusantara concept includes everything that uses words or languages in a creative way, creative in a very broad sense. There is no boundary between mythical fiction and a historical description for example, and there is sometimes no boundary between an enumeration of the adat22 law and a love poem. Some of the most serious theosophical expositions have been put into beautiful poetry, in the syair form, because poetry is much more easily retained by memory and much more pleasant to hear. (Hussein, 1974: 12)


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In the traditional Malay sense, history or the Malay perception of the past was embellished with fiction, myths and legends. However, as Khoo Kay Kim cautions us, these ‘stories’ are not to be flatly dismissed as mere historical fancy rather than fact. Instead, they strike one as history in the guise of fiction. By way of qualification then, the hikayat was a hybrid text comprising fact and fiction and devoid of dates and figures. It does not purport to be an exact representation of past events. In any event, the nineteenth century marks a watershed in Malay historiography in the sense that, as Virginia Matheson writes: ‘the 1800s was a period when the European presence in the Peninsula, particularly in the south, was increasingly evident ... The nineteenth-century writers were interested in Malay ethos but their expression of it, in the shadow of Europeans, was more self-conscious’ (Matheson, 1979: 352). References to orang Belanda and orang Ingris appear in nineteenth-century court annals, reflecting contemporaneous realities and indigenous accommodation of foreigners. In Marlow’s account of Jim in the Patusan section of the novel, we have what suggestively resembles and replicates an exceedingly romantic ruler-legitimation hikayat when Marlow, however ironically, attempts to frame an aura of legitimacy around Jim’s political status among the Malays of Patusan. Marlow is fully aware of the mix of romance and truth in his narrative. This explains his anxiety over the reception of his tale by an incredulous audience that lacks imagination: My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. (LJ 225) In the same way that he tries to decipher the incoherent and enigmatic letter he receives from ‘The Fort, Patusan’, and concludes that ‘[Jim] was overwhelmed by his own personality – the gift of that destiny which he had done his best to master’ (LJ 341), the villagers of Batu Kring had tried to interpret the signs of the mysterious ‘being that descended upon them’, his demands and his appearance: the ‘best part of the night was spent in consultation’ (LJ 243). These similar responses imply a similar historical imagination and historicizing process. Given the oblique allusion to classical Malay historiography, Conrad’s Eastern tales as a whole exude romance and truth. Furthermore, seen in light of the unique blend of fiction and history common to local historiography, Conrad’s insistence that fiction is history constitutes an uncanny coincidence indeed.

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The rest of this book will attempt to show that Conrad’s own historical/ fictional narrative engages with the master narrative of history and that what he was working towards and even advocating is a sense of the past in which fiction and history interpenetrate and ‘collide’. In his discussion of Lord Jim, Terry Collits makes the compelling point that ‘[o]n a number of counts Lord Jim anticipates what has since become a tradition of revisionist rewritings. The master narrative it “writes back” to is not a specific text but a legend with the narrative form and imprecision of a myth’ (Collits, 2005: 129). Collits names the popular novels of heroic adventure as an example of this master narrative. I suggest that it would not be too far-fetched to include Western historical narratives within the framework of this dominant discourse. Robert Hampson argues that ‘[i]f Conrad was “annexing” Borneo for English literature, he was also writing in the context of a textual tradition relating to Malaysia’ and that grappling with problems of representation, he ‘found a solution in Lord Jim by using Brooke material for the construction of an impossible adventure-romance world’: Lord Jim foregrounds the production of narrative, and Brooke material is incorporated into the novel’s self-conscious and critical attention to the production of narrative. The Malay world that is annexed is (in Lord Jim, at least) always already a fiction. It is ‘like something you read of in books’ (LJ 233–4). (Hampson, 2000: 182) To this we may add Jim’s remark about his Bugis friends: ‘They are like people in a book, aren’t they’ (LJ 260)? In writing back to the textual tradition of exotic, heroic adventure romance, Conrad relegates this same colonial world of adventure romance to an impossibility: the East is ‘always already a fiction’. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that in constructing this impossible space, historical materials are employed and invoked, namely books by and about Brooke and his real-life adventures. The Brooke of history and romance exists just as Jim exists for Marlow in spite of how Jim seems to belong to ‘his own world of shades’ (LJ 416). The existence of things and people and the implications of their existence is a key thematic in the novel as I have discussed earlier in the chapter. It can be argued that the most irrefutable proof of the existence of Jim and his adventure-romance world is Jewel: in spite of her own spectral appearance and ethereal white figure, she ‘survives’ this storybook world ‘leading a sort of soundless, inert life in Stein’s house’ (LJ 416–17) where butterflies are an index to things which are real and ‘exact’: ‘This is Nature – the balance of colossal forces’ (LJ 208). The


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point I am making is that, in his Eastern tales, Conrad re-invents the Western textual tradition by self-consciously yoking history to fiction and vice versa. The end result is a work which indirectly mirrors the textual tradition of the East in which historical material and literary imagination are in a relation of contiguity. The hikayat as the iconic literary genre of the Malay world is to a large extent a narrative history in the hands of an accomplished, romantic storyteller. Seen in this light, Conrad’s aesthetic creed, ‘Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing’ (NLL 17), resonates with a thematic significance which is consistently played out not only throughout his Eastern tales but also across his entire corpus. The following two chapters will continue to discuss how the interacting voices of history and fiction, ‘the curse of facts and the blessing of illusions’ (NB 5), resonate simultaneously in Conrad’s tales. These resonances produce a ‘hallucinated vision’ (APR 3) the last word of which could never be uttered. Conrad’s fictional other, Marlow, resigns himself to this reality: ‘And besides, the last word is not said, – probably shall never be said’ (LJ 225).

2 Patusan and the Malays

they reasoned that he must possess spiritual and physical forces superior to theirs. In two months the lonely man [Brooke] became Rajah of Sarawak. (Payne, 1986: 44) They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say – Lord Jim. (LJ 5) I was becoming fanciful in the midst of my industrious scribbling; ... (LJ 172) One of the books Conrad (1857–1924) had read on the subject of the Malays is Major Frederick McNair’s (1828–1910) Perak and the Malays. It is tempting to consider Lord Jim as Conrad’s romantic and no less compelling account of a fictional native state and its inhabitants, Patusan and the Malays as it were. Cedric Watts has pointed out that Mohammed Bonso, Doramin, Tamb Itam and Tunku Allang are characters gleaned from McNair’s narrative (Watts, 1986: 363–4). In Lord Jim, Rajah/Tunku Allang’s exclamation of ‘You hear, my people! No more of these little games’ (LJ 250) echoes one made by the Sultan of Salangore to his followers in McNair’s book (McNair, 1972: 289). In contrast to a work which is widely recognized as belonging to the realm of ethnographic reliability (McNair having witnessed the customs and manners of the Perak Malays first-hand), Patusan and its Malays are Conrad’s conjuration of fragmentary images ‘rescued’ by the writer from obscurity into the light for the multitudes. In this chapter, I show that Conrad’s perception of Malay political culture and statecraft is historically informed and proves pivotal to his romantic construction of the Malay and the white rajahs of his Eastern tales. This fidelity to the facts of history duly fulfils the need ‘to envelop [unfamiliar things] in their proper atmosphere of actuality’ (NB 129–30). More importantly, his fictional 68

Patusan and the Malays

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rendition affords us glimpses into a colonial past which other histories or ‘truth unadorned’ (NLL 60) may be incapable of providing or are simply not wont to provide. Arguably, this dual historical/fictional approach results in the ‘conscientious rendering of truth in thought and fact which has been always [his] aim’ (NB 130). Terry Collits asserts that among Conrad’s colonial fictions, Lord Jim is ‘the only one whose focus is clearly British’ and ‘thus provides the best opportunity for re-examining the question of Conrad’s relationship to British imperialism’ (Collits, 2005: 127). To my mind, it is precisely through such a re-examination that a surplus truth of history can be brought to light.

Hikayat Tuan Jim The first part of this chapter discusses how Conrad’s portrayal of Jim appears to be an ironic commentary on the white rajahs who once flourished in the Malay world. I would like to suggest that Marlow’s oral narrative of Jim’s amazing experience implicitly mimics the Malay hikayat. Furthermore, the thematic sectioning of Lord Jim into the ‘Patna’ and ‘Patusan’ episodes may be said to exemplify the ‘collision of indistinct ideas’, in that the former represents the Real (the domain of unrelenting reason, science, logic, and facts) while the latter represents an attempted foray into the Unreal (the domain of the occult, the marvellous, fantastic, illusion, dreams, and romance). As mimicry, there is an implied element of mockery in Marlow’s narrative; however, the target of contempt is not any particular race or nation but instead the exasperating privileging of ‘facts’ over ‘art’ or imagination. Although it may appear that Conrad associates the West with facts/ history and the East with imagination/myth, the evidence suggests that he was working more towards a solidarity rather than polarity of both Western and Eastern thought: ‘And there is a bond between us and that humanity so far away’ (NB 4). Hampson notes that indigenous historical accounts of the region are incompatible with European versions and that ‘neither can be easily privileged over the other’ (2000: 36); in the same way that Conrad does not privilege either history or literary art, he does not privilege Western historiography over the Eastern. As Hampson states: The account of Jim’s rise to power in Patusan constantly plays the legendary against the historical. Jim complains about the growth of legends: ‘They will sit up half the night talking bally rot’ [LJ 266]. ... the generation of legends, the Jim-myth, among the oral community of


Patusan follows the same process as the proliferation of stories about Jim among the European oral community. Once again it is the very same process as Marlow himself is actively involved in at this very moment of narration. Thus what might appear as difference (between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ communities) turns out to be similarity. (Hampson, 2000: 140) Ultimately, Lord Jim the novel subverts this legend-history binarism and is Conrad’s masterful balancing of both romance and reality as has always been the goal of one who has declared that ‘the romantic feeling of reality was in [him] an inborn faculty’ (NB 128). It can be argued that in Heart of Darkness, Marlow as Conrad’s fictional other finally attains the narratorial middle path of enlightenment as suggested by his ‘pose of a meditating Buddha’ (Y 162). Through the story of Kurtz, the Buddhalike Marlow tells a teaching tale which once again tests the shifting and conflicting boundaries of ‘truths’. As mentioned earlier, Malay historiography is dominated by the hikayat, a genre which melds history and fiction (in the form of legend and myth). The form lends itself to various genres such as memoir, travelogue, romantic adventure, and royal genealogy. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781– 1826) was an avid collector and preserver of these classical manuscripts. As invaluable cultural artefacts, the hikayat were expressions of how the Malays viewed and recorded their past, their own sense of history. These histories were disseminated both in written and spoken form. As a writer who believed in the fundamental interface of history and fiction, Conrad would have been attracted to the hikayat as a mode of storytelling. In Perak and the Malays, Frederick McNair (1828–1910) describes Malay documents including ‘prose literary productions’ such as romances and ‘narrative fictions dealing with history and the demigods and heroes of the traditionary past’ examples of which are the ‘Hikayet Hong Tuah’ and the ‘Sejara Malayu’ (McNair, 1972: 313–14). McNair describes the latter unequivocally as ‘fictions of a highly-exaggerated character’ (McNair, 1972: 308); nevertheless, his assessment of these historical tales is that ‘[w]hen all that is worthless and fabulous in these documents is sifted out, there are, however, several grains of common-sense left behind’ (McNair, 1972: 305). Many of these works produced between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries were penned by palace scribes in order to trace the antiquity of the royal family and also, as in the case of the Sejarah Melayu, to outline the encounters with foreigners and the changes to the old order resulting from that contact. For adventure stories, authors would narrate the exploits of traditional heroes.


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It can be argued that the Patusan sequence in Lord Jim (chapter 24 onwards) reveals a subtext of the hikayat. The sequence is punctuated with tacit references to the hikayat in the form of cultural markers, such as the palace scribe who tells the story of the white man’s jewel, a story which ‘otherwise was all wrong’ and of which the only true part was that ‘[r]omance had singled Jim for its own’ (LJ 282). Marlow points to the myths and stories about Jim’s amazing exploits which had by then been circulating near and far: ‘Already the legend had gifted him with supernatural powers’ (LJ 266); ‘I discovered that a story was travelling slowly down the coast about a mysterious white man in Patusan who had got hold of an extraordinary gem’ (LJ 280); and ‘There was already a story that the tide had turned two hours before its time to help him on his journey up the river’ (LJ 242–3). For the fisher-folk of Batu Kring, legend and myth are contiguous with ‘ancient history’ (LJ 242); all that Marlow hears from the talkative elderly headman is the story of Jim’s arrival in that village and how that visitation was a blessing. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, Collits argues that Conrad’s novel Lord Jim writes back to a master narrative, namely the ‘popular novels of heroic adventure’ which are manifestations of ‘a legend with the narrative form and imprecision of a myth’ (Collits, 2005: 129). Hampson too explores the processes by which facts are transformed into legends and legend into myths in the novel. He notes: ‘Chapter 16 supplies the first account of Jim’s career in Patusan, and this introduction of Patusan links it firmly with the idea of legends’ (Hampson, 2000: 135): ‘The time was coming when I should see him loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess forming round his name as though he had been the stuff of a hero’ (175). Watts describes the Patusan sequence as ‘the section in which the narrative becomes relatively straightforward’ and smacks of romantic adventure tales (Watts, 1986: 19). I propose that this straightforwardness and romantic element are suggestive of the hikayat in subjectmatter as well as style, the clear-cut themes being the origin and legitimacy of the ruling house, the fantastic feats of an adventure hero, and the intercourse with white men, and the style a deliberate blending of fact, superstition, and myth. Knowing full well that his Western audience would not appreciate a mythical treatment of an ordinary man who was ultimately merely ‘one of us’, Marlow’s storytelling is hampered by the ‘collision of indistinct ideas’ (the facts of the case versus romantic fiction) right at the outset. As such, he has to deftly negotiate the monolithic history-fiction divide. He has to somehow


explain that the inexplicable way in which Jim had suddenly appeared in the midst of Patusan Malays (for the fisher-folk of Batu Kring, the event is read as the ‘appearance of the being that descended upon them’ [LJ 243]) and saved them from their enemies) was nothing short of magical for the Malays or to use less problematic but dull adjectives, ‘wonderful’ or ‘amazing’ (LJ 248). In this sequence, Marlow foregrounds the line separating fact from fancy when he is obliged to translate the ‘bally rot’ (LJ 266) subscribed to by Jim’s followers into a form which his unimaginative European listeners (and he himself who also mistrusted (his) want of imagination) can comprehend or at least find plausible. Nevertheless, this strategy is translated into awed, exaggerated statements like, ‘He dominated the forest, the secular gloom, the old mankind’ (LJ 265). And I can’t with mere words convey to you the impression of his total and utter isolation. ... the unsuspected qualities of his nature had brought him in such close touch with his surroundings that this isolation seemed only the effect of his power. His loneliness added to his stature. There was nothing within sight to compare him with, ... . [His fame] shared something of the nature of that silence through which it accompanied you into unexplored depths, heard continuously by your side, penetrating, far-reaching – tinged with wonder and mystery on the lips of whispering men. (LJ 272) Consider Marlow’s attempt to explain Jim’s legendary ‘occult’ exploits in a way which would be more easily received by a sceptical Western audience: I ... was proud – for him, if not so certain of the fabulous value of the bargain. It was wonderful. It was not so much of his fearlessness that I thought. It is strange how little account I took of it: as if it had been something too conventional to be at the root of the matter. No. I was more struck by the other gifts he had displayed. He had proved his grasp of the unfamiliar situation, his intellectual alertness in that field of thought. There was his readiness too! Amazing. And all this had come to him in a manner like keen scent to a well-bred hound. He was not eloquent, but there was a dignity in this constitutional reticence, there was a high seriousness in his stammerings. (LJ 248) Marlow resorts to imagery and simile to tell his remarkable tale and uses his similes ‘advisedly’ (LJ 108) to reconstruct Jim’s aura as it were. The


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following passage offers another example: I had never seen Jim look so grave, so self-possessed, in an impenetrable, impressive way. In the midst of these dark-faced men, his stalwart figure in white apparel, the gleaming clusters of his fair hair, seemed to catch all the sunshine that trickled through the cracks in the closed shutters of that dim hall, with its walls of mats and a roof of thatch. He appeared like a creature not only of another kind but of another essence. Had they not seen him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended upon them from the clouds. (LJ 229) In this way, Marlow’s carefully wrought narrative strategy does not completely abandon the ‘supernatural’ or legendary aspects of Jim’s new-found stature and achievements; instead, it merely mediates and reconfigures the legend for an exasperatingly unimaginative audience while trying to present the natives’ point of view. When Tamb’ Itam speaks of how on the evening of Jim’s death, ‘the aspect of the heavens was angry and frightful’, Marlow has to explain the phenomenon: ‘I may well believe it, for I know that on that very day a cyclone passed within sixty miles of the coast, though there was hardly more than a languid stir of air in the place’ (LJ 413). This particular register also suggests that although Marlow assures Jim (and indirectly, his audience) that he does not believe in ‘bally rot’ (‘My dear fellow, you don’t suppose I believe this’ [LJ 266–7]), he is nonetheless bowled over by the immensity of Jim’s turn of fortunes and personal transformation and resorts to a mode of storytelling which is inflected with nuances of the mysterious and illogical. The story of a decent enough young man, albeit a recognized coward, who is dramatically elevated to a hero-king in a native state must surely qualify as the stuff of exotic romance: a strange but true phenomenon. Ironically, white rajahs were a common enough phenomenon in the British Empire; the enigma surrounding such historical figures is the crux of Conrad’s Lord Jim. As if in anticipation of his listeners’ incredulousness, Marlow emphasizes how the tired truths of western civilization are fallible and suggests that like ‘works of art’, the exoticism of the East contains its own hidden truths: But do you notice how, three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art? (LJ 282)


Marlow’s tale which he reiterates ‘gets dwarfed in the telling’ (LJ 272) (‘or rather in the hearing’ [LJ 225]) is taken up again more than two years later when the ‘privileged man’ (LJ 337) reads Marlow’s last words on Jim’s fate. In his letter, Marlow highlights that ‘the language of facts ... [is] so often more enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words’ and that [t]he story of the last events ... is romantic beyond the wildest dreams of [Jim’s] boyhood, and yet there is to [Marlow’s] mind a sort of profound and terrifying logic in it, as if it were our imagination alone that could set loose upon us the might of an overwhelming destiny. (LJ 342) Through his own manipulation of Marlow’s narrative technique, Conrad seems to suggest that the enigma of empire itself ‘has happened – and there is no disputing its logic’ (LJ 343) and that the ‘strange but true’ story of this empire can only be recounted in the colliding and dual registers of factual, documentary history and romantic fiction: a Hikayat of the British Empire, as it were.

He who is made lord After the Dutch and British had established their territories in the archipelago, they introduced Indirect Rule. For the new colonial regime, kingship is an economical way of managing the masses through their monarchs and preserving and exploiting the trappings of kingship, although not necessarily its executive powers (thus maintaining the illusion of sovereignty). For the precolonial Malays, the monarch is the raison d’être of a state’s political existence. The Malay term for ‘government’ is kerajaan which literally denotes ‘the condition of having a rajah’. In ‘Karain: A Memory’, we read that ‘[Karain] seemed too effective, too necessary there, too much of an essential condition for the existence of his land and his people, ... He summed up his race, his country’ (TU 7). Indirect Rule which was implemented by appointed Residents1 was a form of colonial governance which depended on the continued survival of the kerajaan. Lord Jim as metonymic of the new order (along with the many pioneering British Residents2 who ruled their realms in the style of regents), is the ‘indirect ruler’ since Doramin and Tunku Allang continue to rule over their own stockades and followers. Nevertheless, Jim is the ‘virtual ruler’ (LJ 273, emphasis added) of all Patusan, one whom Doramin humbly approaches, cap in hand, to ask


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for a particular favour. It was Jim who, ‘in consultation with Dain Waris, appointed the headmen. Thus he became the virtual ruler of the land’ (LJ 273). In the Malay polity, it is the ruler with executive power who appoints the headmen. When Doramin’s reveals his ‘hope of yet seeing his son ruler of Patusan’ and expresses a desire for a promise to that effect from Tuan Jim, Marlow had ‘tried to put the subject aside. It was difficult, for there could be no question that Jim had the power; in his new sphere there did not seem to be anything that was not his to hold or to give’ (LJ 274) and ‘[h]is word decided everything’ (LJ 269). As such, even Dain Waris’s fate with regards to succession seems to lie within Jim’s authority, hence nullifying the very significance of the former’s name since ‘Waris’ denotes ‘Heir’. At this point, an examination of the key features of the precolonial Malay polity and the institution of the Malay Rajah, some aspects of which have survived to this day, is in order. Khoo Kay Kim writes: The institution of monarchy, once firmly implanted within the Melaka society, became an essential integral part of peninsular Malay political culture. Until the advent of British influence in the 19th century, there was no concept of ‘state’ (in the Western sense) in Malay society. ... The Malay conceptualization of authority was directly linked to the presence of a raja; territory was unimportant, hence the term kerajaan (the state of having a raja), which is, more appropriately, the Malay equivalent of the Western concept of a ‘kingdom’. (Khoo, 1991: 25) This summary pertains to kingdoms in the Malay peninsula but it would not be inappropriate to extend it to the other realms of the archipelago as well. The Malay ruler is ‘he who is made lord’, or ‘Yang di-Pertuan’ (Yamtuan to the Bugis3), a title with which the British were familiar. Khoo states: ‘In most treaties (with the British) of the 19th century, the Raja was formally referred to as Yang di-Pertuan (He who is made Lord)’ (Khoo, 1991: 46). Marlow’s narrative makes it possible to conceive of Jim himself as a Yang di-Pertuan, ‘he who is made lord’. In the eyes of his subjects, Jim is surely a king or ‘rajah’ and not a mere ‘Tuan’. However, the honorific ‘Tuan’ can simply be a deferential or polite form of address and there are many other Tuan Putihs/White Lords in Conrad’s fiction, the weak Almayer for one. Yet Marlow reports: ‘They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say – Lord Jim’ (LJ 5). Christopher GoGwilt argues that the ‘might’ signals an uncertainty which underscores the shifts in cultural contexts ‘that began to eclipse


the self-assured English claim to lordship’ as demonstrated in the fact that Tuan Jim is not nearly so grand as Rajah Brooke. He goes on to add that the problem of naming and entitlement that is implied in the naming of Jim as ‘Tuan’ or ‘Lord’ underscores the difficult relation between local knowledge and global power and that ‘the proper “Malay” meaning for “Tuan” can never be placed, but provides the absent centre for understanding the meaning of that metaphorical title “Lord” ’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 90–1). This astute observation is made even more compelling by the Malays’ own shifting usage of the multipurpose term ‘Tuan’. The Malay courtly address for their king is ‘Tuanku’ or ‘My Lord’ and the monarch is Yang di-Pertuan or ‘he who is made lord’. It can be said that in the eyes of the Patusan Bugis-Malays, Jim is Yang di-Pertuan or Yamtuan in spite of Conrad’s telling omission. To his audience, Marlow insists that Jim had political authority foisted onto him by his followers, thus actually reinforcing the passive voice of the title: Jim is made lord rather than becomes one. Jim is consistently portrayed as a ruler who had no choice in his own enthronement; he had to perform according to popular demand. Marlow repeatedly reminds his listeners that Jim did not assume leadership on his own volition but that he was a ‘captive’ ruler ‘imprisoned within the very freedom of his power’ (LJ 283): because all his conquests, the trust, the fame, the friendships, the love – all these things that made him master had made him a captive, too. He looked with an owner’s eye at the peace of the evening, at the river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of the forests, at the life of the old mankind; at the secrets of the land, at the pride of his own heart: but it was they that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath. ... 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 247, 248, 262, emphases added) The ironic implications that this holds for the European conquest of the Malay world are tremendous. It was widely believed in colonial circles that the natives were grateful for European intervention since many had grown tired of their feuding, tyrannical rulers. It is almost as if Europeans had no choice in the matter; colonialism was desirable and morally justifiable because the Malays needed protection from various ‘enemies’ including their own backwardness. Malay states were reinvented


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and categorized as ‘Protected’ or ‘Unprotected’ depending on the status of relations or agreements between the individual states and the British. ‘It was ... with the claim of “restoring order” to the area that the British came to justify their intervention in Malay affairs’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 76). The British ‘put themselves forward as protectors of the Malays, who were regarded as the indigenous masters of the country’ (Cheah, 1999: 100). Hugh Clifford (1866–1941) once referred to ‘this huge moral-forcing system which [Britain called] “Protection” ’ (Clifford, 1989a: 5). Conrad himself invokes moral obligations towards humanity as the motivating factor behind his Eastern literary enterprise: It seems now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these [Easterners], seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth? (APR 9) Nonetheless, apart from the rhetoric of protection and moral imperatives, less honourable intentions also prevailed. Marlow’s description of Stein is qualified with the hesitant admission that monetary reward was also part of the moral thrust: ‘There were very few places in the Archipelago he had not seen in the original dusk of their being, before light (and even electric light) had been carried into them for the sake of better morality and – and – well – the greater profit, too’ (LJ 219). However, in Jim’s case, it can be argued that the moral grounds for intervention stem from a deep-seated private need to come to terms with the dishonourable desertion of his ship. In the novel, Jim enthuses, ‘It’s the knowledge that had I been wiped out it is this place that would have been the loser’ (LJ 245). To reinforce his belief that his presence in Patusan was needed, even imperative, he reiterates: ‘but only try to think what it would be if I went away. Jove! Can’t you see it? Hell loose’ (LJ 333). Even among the Malays of Patusan, the Europeans have the reputation of instituting ‘the reign of the white men who protected poor people’ (LJ 366). In his narrative of Jim, Marlow’s attempt to represent the dramatic events is complicated by a desire to somehow explain how a morally tormented fugitive like Jim can find himself the de facto ruler of Patusan’s Malays. Jim’s authority may have been initially constructed around ‘bally rot’ but this does not prevent him from proving himself responsible, absolutely trustworthy, and even worthy of his serendipitous new-found glory, which can also be read as his one chance to redeem himself of his shame. He asserts: ‘I

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believe I am equal to all my luck!’ (LJ 304) and ‘Look at these houses; there’s not one where I am not trusted’ (LJ 246). Nonetheless, unbeknownst to his subjects, Patusan’s protector struggles under the burden of a past betrayal; a mistake he is determined never to repeat as he declares vehemently: ‘I must feel – every day, every time I open my eyes – that I am trusted’ (LJ 247). Jim is spurred to earn and deserve the trust of his Malays, ironically motivated largely by a desire to atone for a breach of trust where the passengers of the Patna were concerned. It can be argued that this compulsion to atone for his misdeed engulfs his entire being although there is also the genuine wish to alleviate the sufferings of his Malays. Undoubtedly prompted by Marlow’s visit, the burning question of whether Jim would remain in Patusan or not seems to be a thematic concern considering how Jewel, Doramin, Marlow, and Jim himself confront the issue at several points in the text. With his declaration, ‘but only try to think what it would be if I went away’ (LJ 333), Jim justifies his continued presence. In his self-portrayal as an indispensable and loyal protector figure, Jim represents the paternalism of empire. However, Conrad emphasizes that it is Jim who depends on his defenceless Malays for safety and moral protection. As Jim confesses to Marlow: ‘I must go on, go on for ever holding up my end, to feel sure that nothing can touch me. I must stick to their belief in me to feel safe’ (LJ 334). The essential difference between Jim and the other white lords of the Malay world is that ‘holding up [his] end’ of the bargain suggests a protection that is reciprocal and restores agency to the natives: ‘I’ve done a thing or two for them, but this is what they have done for me’ (LJ 306). It is ironic of course that it is their blind faith in him and their conflation of history with myth and legend that Jim can count on even if they were to be told the truth: Is not strange, ... that all these people, all these people who would do anything for me, can never be made to understand? Never! ... If you ask them who is brave – who is true – who is just – who is it they would trust with their lives? – they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth. ... you just try to tell [that you wouldn’t like to have me aboard your own ship] to any of them here. They would think you a fool, a liar, or worse. And so I can stand it. (LJ 306–7) In the East, colonial powers depended on the aura of racial prestige and moral superiority to rule over their subjects. Consider how Dain


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Waris was deemed vulnerable unlike Jim: ‘He had not Jim’s racial prestige’ (LJ 361). In an ironic sense, this prestige also constitutes a form of ‘bally rot’ especially when embodied in the Gentlemen Brown, Jones, and other miscreants of the West. This covert critique of Empire also surfaces when seen in light of the imperial appropriation of native models of kingship and kingdoms for political leverage. The appropriation and imitation of older models has been observed by T.N. Harper: ‘In Malaysia and the region, European empires were built on old sites of royal power and attempted to usurp their claims to universalism’ (Harper, 2001: 8). In his study of the British Empire and its ‘globalization with gunboats’, Niall Ferguson states that ‘the British were not the first empire-builders, but the pirates who scavenged from the earlier empires of Portugal, Spain, Holland and France. They were imperial imitators’ (Ferguson, 2004: xxv). This imitation is evident in the British colonization of the Malay Archipelago. Ultimately, Conrad’s ‘imitation’ of indigenous historical narrative as discussed earlier underscores his claim that truth may well emerge from the interweaving of history and fiction, ‘utilitarian lies’ and ‘pure exercises of imagination’ (LJ 282). Nevertheless, this truth is itself illusory and subjective just as Jim’s mortality and initial moral weakness emblematize a ‘racial prestige’ (LJ 361) which is evanescent and ‘bally rot’ (LJ 266). ‘He who is made lord’ is surrounded by an aura of sanctity and invincibility called daulat (loosely translated as ‘sovereignty’), a concept apparently traceable to an ancient Indian consecration rite through which sakti, or divine magical powers, was acquired by the future founder of the Melaka dynasty and henceforth handed down to his progeny (Wolters, 1970: 124). Daulat imbues the king with supernatural powers and legitimizes his reign while raising the prestige of his pedigree. With daulat, the king is assured that none of his subjects would ever betray him or commit acts of treason (derhaka) against him, for this sakti would fell the traitor and cause him to die a slow and agonizing death. Daulat was the supreme expression of the quality of the ‘majesty’, and its possession of a ruler constituted divine sanction of his reign. It was a stable, impersonal quality, beyond the influence of its holder’s character or abilities. It could act arbitrarily and offensively to protect the ruler, his command and his dignity, and enabled him to accomplish acts of great magic. In short, daulat was a foundation of the ideology of legitimation. (Moy, 1978: 134–5)

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Khoo notes that the British were well-acquainted with the concept of derhaka and used it to their own ends: The institution of Yang Di-Pertuan was preserved and, in effect, strengthened so that the traditional social ties between ruler and subjects were maintained. This policy of ruling the Malays through their sultan proved highly successful on the whole. Even uprisings led by traditional chiefs were, to a large extent, nullified by coercing the rulers into promulgating decrees stigmatising such anti-British uprisings as derhaka (meaning more or less treason). And in the name of the rulers the British used their military might to suppress any form of political unrest. (Khoo, 1991: 128) It can be argued that Conrad knew something about kingly daulat and derhaka for his Malay fictions reveal that he was aware of the Malay ruler’s traditional claim to sanctity and supernatural qualities and how followers of the king have come to expect nothing less from their rajah. From his readings and exposure to the Malay world ethos, he would have known that ruler-legitimation in the Malay world was common and that palace scribes entrusted with this function were not above inventing links between their lords and sacral-magical monuments like Mount Si Guntang in Palembang, Sumatra. This is the mountain where it was recounted that three heavenly beings appeared: spiritual beings to whom the prestigious royal house of Melaka traces its origins.4 In keeping with Malay folklore and political tradition, the Patusan subjects are awed by Jim’s ‘magical’ prowess; his elevation to the position of ruler is made possible partly by that same perceived ‘magic’. The ‘magic’ surrounding Jim is necessary in order to endow him with the authority that the Malay population could relate to for, as Anthony Reid states: ‘the political myths of Java, as of Minangkabau or Acheh or Melaka-Johor, are descended from a single magical source of power and legitimacy’ (Reid, 2000: 62). It is altogether suggestive that the ‘Jewel’ rumour of ‘this amazing Jimmyth’ (LJ 280) is narrated to Marlow by ‘a sort of scribe to the wretched little Rajah of the place’ (LJ 280) 230 miles south of Patusan River. It is as if the myths of power surrounding Jim, his ‘wonderful strength’ (280), his fabulous wealth, his ‘insoluble mystery’ (LJ 306), his invulnerability, his ‘reputation of invincible, supernatural power’ (LJ 310) seem destined to be textualized as a political myth or historical chronicle5 (Marlow’s tale, though oral, is itself eventually reproduced as ‘text’ by his narratee-scribe). A royal scribe’s duty is to write the


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history of the land and its ruling house and is not averse to colouring his tale with invention and embellishment. As discussed above, the new Tuans of the Malay world may rubbish the Malay belief in ‘bally rot’ (266) but even ‘bally rot’ can be useful given the Malay’s perceived gullibility and susceptibility to the occult. The following section focuses on the complex political world of Patusan itself and will demonstrate how Conrad’s imaginary native state constitutes a remarkable interplay of historical accuracy, romantic vision and ironic design.

Jim’s ‘new sphere’ (274) To be lord in an exotic realm, ruling over a population equivalent to that of a good-sized town, is a romance of power that could very rarely be consummated in Europe. (Beekman, 1982: 349) The British, after the Pangkor Engagement of 1874, had consolidated their territorial position in their sphere of influence with the Crown Colony of the Straits Settlements and the peninsular Malay states of Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan securely under British control. By 1896 (incidentally the year after Almayer’s Folly was published), these protected states were subsequently grouped into a new political unit known as the Federated Malay States (FMS). By 1919, the northern Malay states (former vassals of the Siamese king) of Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, and Trengganu as well as the administratively sophisticated Johor in the south had been ceded to the British. These last five kingdoms were collectively known as the UMS or the Unfederated Malay States as their Malay rulers were reluctant to join the Federation. From 1874, the British began ruling the protected Malay states via a Residency system whereby the Malay rulers would remain superficially at the apex of government but British Residents would make the executive decisions under the guise of Indirect Rule (to a degree, the current system of appointing a Chief Minister for each Malay state is a legacy of the British Residential System). Yeo Kim Wah summarizes this aspect of British policy: Based on the various Anglo-Malay treaties, which maintained the fiction that the British Resident was an adviser to the Malay ruler, the British established a form of administration generally known as a system of indirect rule. In this new order, the Malay rulers retained their constitutional and ceremonial role, while the exercise of executive power was held firmly in British hands. (Yeo, 1980: 287)


It is a well-known fact that ‘under the treaties and agreements with the Malay States the British Residents in the FMS and the Advisers in the unfederated States are empowered to give advice which must be asked and acted upon in all matters other than Malay religion and custom’ (Emerson, 1964: 54). Khoo writes that with such a system in place, it was finally the non-royal aristocrats who lost out on their privileges and traditional functions in the wake of the radical changes wrought by the British: The power of the non-royal aristocrats had been eroded. Some of them might yet have survived but for the fact that British control of the peninsular states had begun by the mid-1870s. The British proceeded to modify the long-standing indigenous political machinery. They strengthened the apex (institution of monarchy) and maintained the base (institution of local headmen) but deprived the titular and other administrative officers of their traditional functions within the polity. (Khoo, 1991: 42) At the turn of the century, a new class of administrators emerged, namely the professional bureaucrats recruited into the Malayan Civil Service. This was formerly the exclusive preserve of British cadets nominated by Whitehall, but later admitted Malays into its ranks, whereupon this group became known as the Malay Administrative Service (1910). As a matter of expediency, many of the Malay recruits were initially culled from the nobility but with the introduction of meritocracy via education, commoners could partake of this upward social mobility and many of the ‘unqualified’ ruling élite found themselves left out in the cold with nothing more than pensions and ceremonial functions. Consequently, many of the Malay nobles, stripped of their traditional functions and revenue rights, were reduced to poverty. A good number of disenfranchised anak raja (patrilineal royal aristocrats) were incorporated into the penghulu (village headman) system, but a greater number were compensated for the loss of power and income by the grant of fixed allowances from state funds. Local chiefs in former times were appointed Native Magistrates but in their case, ‘there were difficulties in reshaping traditional roles in new, bureaucratic forms’ while ‘the aristocrat who became a penghulu was disposed to regard his official position as a source of income rather than a working responsibility’ (Gullick, 1989: 77). In the case of the Dutch, the principle and application of Indirect Rule deviated from those of the British in some ways. For instance, the government of the Netherlands Indies never conceived of


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native states as protected states, whereas the British considered the states of Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan, and Pahang as Protected Malay States and the rest (Johor, Kelantan, Trengganu, Kedah, Perlis) as Unprotected Malay States. The rule of thumb was that Protectorates6 were to be ruled indirectly while the Straits Settlements (Melaka, Singapore, and Prince of Wales Isle/Penang), which formed a part of the Crown Colony, were, of course, ruled directly. On the Dutch side, all states recognizing Dutch supremacy and suzerainty were deemed part of Dutch territories without differentiating between colony and protectorate. In any case, the Dutch system also introduced Residents as the new breed of administrators and these became the new ‘kings’ of their realms even as the British Residents were the new Tuan Resident or regents of their states. To the Malay, supreme authority takes the form and image of a rajah; as such, a Resident is also a ‘rajah’. The mid-1870s coincided with the inauguration of the Residential system, the first generation of such ‘rajahs’ in an ever-evolving system. Conrad’s Tuan Putih (white lord) figures are composites of adventurers like James Brooke (1803–68), Rajah of Sarawak, as well as the Residents who ruled in the outposts quite unperturbed by the colonial state (although they were not entirely free agents). Conrad’s imaginary white rajahs are like a frieze to his Malay tapestry. As Resink reminds us, the ‘kings’ of the Malay world were not just Malay. Indeed, history has shown that they were also English, Dutch, Danish, German, Italian, French, American, and so on (Resink, 1968: 312–13). Even District Officers saw themselves as rulers of the Malays. As John Butcher notes: ‘Rather than seeing the Malay rakyat in British terms as tenants on an estate, it was also possible for an official to see himself in Malay terms, as a rajah’ (1979: 54). The appropriation of royal Malay titles is also evident in the naming of the Rajah Laut although it is often the Malays themselves who perform the naming. William Lingard (and his fictional double, Tom) was neither the first nor the only Rajah Laut in the nineteenth-century Malay world. For example, the title of Laksamana Raja Laut existed in Sungai Ujong before the British established their administration in the state (Khoo, 1991: 34). In any case, the notion of white rajahs was not new to the region’s complex history. In the Hikayat Abdullah (Abdullah’s Account/Chronicles, published in 1849), the influential scribe, Munshi Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, refers to Colonel William Farquhar (1770–1839; Resident of Melaka with the British interim government when Dutch possessions came under British rule) as Tuan Raja Farquhar, and the Resident’s deputy, Adrian Koek (an ex-VOC official who continued to serve the


government of Melaka under the British administration), as Raja Muda dalam negeri Melaka, that is the Regent of Melaka (Abdul Kadir, 1970: 33, 65). Obviously, positions of leadership and authority could only be made comprehensible to the Malay’s feudalistic mindset in terms of regnal or aristocratic titles. In addition, Bernard Vlekke in The Story of the Dutch East Indies, discovers that in actual fact, the notions of ‘king’ and ‘kingdom’ meant something very different in Indonesian/Malay history: For the most part these kings and princes were merely local chiefs of districts without definite authority or a well-defined territory. This holds good not only for the Hindu period of Indonesian history, but also for the periods of Portuguese and Dutch domination. ... The head of a village acquires his position because of his sense of responsibility and his knowledge of local customs. ... The other type of petty king is quite different. A Malayan trader from Sumatra, the Peninsula, or Java comes to one of the less civilised islands, establishes a trading post, and, knowing what merchandise the outside world wants, secures a monopoly. He collects followers and slaves and organises a bodyguard, which only too often is merely a gang of criminals. He begins to exact toll from passing ships and to levy tribute from the native tribes, and he fights off all competition. ... The man who manages to gain control over a few other posts becomes a king. (Vlekke, 1946: 43–4) Quite aside from the prestigious and illustrious Melaka and Johor sultans, some Malay rajahs were not bona fide dynastic kings from longstanding ruling houses, but merchants, tribal chiefs, or village headmen. The description above certainly fits many of Conrad’s petty ‘kings’ and chieftains: Lakamba, Patalolo, Nakhoda Doramin, Sherif Ali, Belarab, Tengga, and Sherif Daman come to mind. Even Karain is deemed ‘only a petty chief of a conveniently isolated corner of Mindanao’ (TU 7) by his gun-running friends. However, his devoted followers revere him, ‘[celebrate] with loyal enthusiasm the virtues of their ruler’ and ‘[accept] his words humbly, like gifts of fate’ (TU 4). Rivalries and factionalism were rife as one ‘king’ sought to oust another. As Lingard advises: ‘[Belarab] is the chief man on the Shore of Refuge. There are others, of course’ (TU 103). There are also exceptions to this line-up of minor or parvenu ‘kings’. Arguably, Pata Hassim and Karain from the Bugis states have illustrious lineage and pedigree, being the progeny of established royal families. So too, Maroola, the ‘Son of Heaven’ (AF 66) or Anak


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Dewa Agong of Balinese aristocracy (although Conrad also confers Maroola with the Bugis title ‘Dain’ which in itself may not necessarily point to a factual error but simply suggest the fluidity of borders and cross-cultural fertilization characteristic of the Malay world). Adding to the complexity of the Malay political ethos is the phenomenon of membuat negeri (founding a realm) where an exiled King with an illustrious lineage may establish his kingdom anywhere and not fret over a following. Kingdoms come and go but not a prestigious rajah. So, although the dastardly and rapacious Rajah Allang (uncle of the ineffectual sultan) is the bane of his subjects, they remain with him if only for his legitimate lineage: There were in Patusan antagonistic forces, and one of them was Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan’s uncles, the governor of the river, who did the extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating, – ‘for indeed’, as Stein remarked, ‘where could they go, and how could they get away?’ No doubt they did not even desire to get away. The world (which is circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains) has been given into the hand of the high-born, and this Rajah they knew: he was of their own royal house. (LJ 228, emphasis in original) The extent of a ruler’s power depended on the size of his following and the allegiance of the crowds is crucial. In ‘Karain: A Memory’, the unnamed narrator is impressed by the crowd which makes up ‘Karain’s people – a devoted following’ (TU 4). This local phenomenon of constructing a realm can also be said to take place in the context of imperial conquest where a roaming British ‘sovereign’ leaves home to found new kingdoms and colonies abroad. Karain expresses a solidarity with the Queen of his British friends: ‘... he was fascinated by the holder of a sceptre the shadow of which, stretching from the westward over the earth and over the seas, passed far beyond his own hand’s-breath of conquered land’ (TU 12–13). In Conrad’s fictional Patusan, the social, economic, and political set-up is a remarkably accurate replica of a historical landscape which has witnessed the ebb and flow of political fortunes over the centuries: what the Andayas describe as ‘the cyclical pattern of alternating unity and fragmentation which had characterized Malay-Indonesian commerce and politics for well over a thousand years’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 76). In Patusan, Conrad has fashioned a territory which

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bears the residual effects of a long and multifarious history. Although geographically remote, ‘far from the beaten tracks of the sea and from the ends of submarine cables’ (357), Patusan is a microcosm of both the Malay precolonial and colonial political landscape. Typically a riverine settlement and district named after the river itself, the name is ‘probably that of a largish village up a river in a native state’ (357). The three-cornered fight between Tunku/Rajah Allang, Nakhoda Doramin, and Sherif Ali epitomizes the involvement of the Bugis (represented by Doramin), and Arab (represented by Sherif Ali) communities in the realms of the ‘country-born’ Malays (represented by Tunku Allang) since precolonial times. The eighteenth century is famously known as the Bugis period in Malay history, when the exodus of South Celebes peoples to Riau-Lingga, Sumatra, and the peninsula since the last quarter of the seventeenth century led to their gradual domination of the ruling houses of Johor, Selangor, and Linggi. The Bugis Daengs (‘Dains’) became masters of Johor and consolidated their position through marriage into the old Melaka dynasty ousted by the Portuguese. The Arabic element is also pre-eminent. Arabs from the Hadhramaut region in the Arabian peninsula or their part-Arab descendants rose in sociopolitical importance with one Sayid Ali even becoming ruler of Siak at the end of the eighteenth century. Somewhere in the background are the ‘bush-folk’7 (257) or orang asli (indigenous proto-Malays) purportedly won over by the part-Arab Sherif Ali. Here, effectively, in Stein’s ‘expert’ reportage, is a moribund Malay world characterized by diaspora (although the oppressed and destitute villagers ‘had not even the resource of emigrating’ [228]), the rajah-centred polity (‘the hand of the high-born’ [228]), the dependence of Malays on their regal lodestone, the demise of the once-flourishing pepper trade which had drawn the Dutch and English (‘the glory has departed’ after ‘a century of checkered intercourse’ [227]), and fears of an alien invasion (‘Were the Dutch coming to take the country?’ [252]) typical of the mid-nineteenth century. In Patusan, too, we discern a condition affecting the Malay world at various points in its history whereby a dominant overlord is absent. As the Andayas note: Without an acknowledged overlord, individual states now had greater freedom in seeking their own political and economic goals. To nineteenth-century observers, however, a situation where various rulers were attempting to assert their independence or supremacy appeared ‘chaotic’ and symptomatic of the ‘decay’ besetting the Malay world. (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 76)


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Into this ‘decaying’ world, Jim had jumped: a fateful leap of the enterprising white Rajah into a fragmented and volatile social, economic and political space fuelled mainly by the scramble for revenue: ‘Of course the quarrels were for trade’ (LJ 256). The white rajah’s influence and power over these quarrelling factions are such that even a Rajah Allang (he of ‘their own royal house’) ‘could not help showing his fear’, prompting Marlow to assert: ‘Note! Even where [Jim] would be most hated he was still trusted’ (LJ 249). Patusan is also reminiscent of developments in the archipelago’s shifting political fortunes which may see an impoverished native ruler, an ‘imbecile’ whose income is ‘an uncertain and beggarly revenue extorted from a miserable population and stolen from him by his many uncles’ (227), being compelled to cede large tracts of his kingdom to a white rajah for a song. Consider the long list of adventurers who have gone on to claim ‘suzerainty’ over the many nooks and crannies of the archipelago: Baron von Overbeck (Maharaja of Sabah), Alexander Hare (white Raja of Moloeko), the Clunies-Ross dynasty (Cocos Islands), the list goes on. More importantly, Conrad’s fictional Patusan is also the stage of a man’s struggle to atone for his guilt. The white figure who looms so large and visible in the midst of the land is a captive king who bears the moral burden of not just his own personal conscience but also that of his subjects and perhaps even of his British ‘nation’. It is possible to argue that fiction’s ‘surplus’ in the imaginary Patusan suggests that the white rajah is ‘responsible for every life in the land’ (LJ 394) and that he will inevitably pay the price of his guilt and that of his nation despite the best and purest of intentions and the seeming reciprocity of loyalties. It can be argued that Jim’s desire to atone for his sin of betrayal spurs him to be faithful to his subjects, but that it is the same guilt which leads him to sacrifice his life by the end of the story. The fiction also suggests that it is not the white man who liberates the land and the people; it is the land and the people who redeem him, just as Patusan gives Jim a second chance to do the honourable thing. The East serves as an arena for displaced guilt, protracted expiation, and the working out of European moral issues. Meanwhile, the British administrative élite had retained the Malay monarchy for the sake of commanding the masses and reducing the costs of administration, the pragmatic basis of indirect rule. In reality of course, it was the Residents and Advisers who held the reigns of power. They were the ‘virtual rulers’ of the land just as Jim is unabashedly the paramount ruler of Patusan. As befits their tradition, the villagers of


Batu Kring view him naively as ‘overlord’. In the meantime, the cowed Tunku Allang continued to rule over the villagers on his side of the river while acknowledging Jim’s suzerainty and Doramin himself remained the autonomous chief over his Bugis followers. Nevertheless, it is obvious that Jim is the undisputed Maharajah of his raj, his ‘new sphere’ (274). The essential difference between the white overlord and those of past empires would lie in the extent of interference which the lord exercised over his vassals and dependencies. Clearly, Jim is ‘virtual ruler’ (LJ 273) not just in spirit but also in fact. He would institute reforms and a ‘new order of things’ (LJ 366), which would clearly be at loggerheads with the old traditions, for instance, granting slaves their freedom. Jim had instituted significant changes as he affirms: ‘Yes, I’ve changed all that’ (LJ 333). Indirect Rule or the Residential system, which was in practice in the peninsular Malay states at the time of Conrad’s sojourn, was perhaps a deceitful veneer designed to veil the truth that the Residents were the effective virtual rulers of the realm and not the Malay Rajahs. As Sir F.D. Lugard had written: From first to last the theoretical independence of the states was the governing factor in the system evolved in Malaya. The so-called ‘Resident’ was in fact a Regent, practically uncontrolled by the Governor or Whitehall, governing his ‘independent’ state by direct, personal rule, with or without the co-operation of the native ruler. (Lugard, 1926: 130–1) In her study of the Protected Malay States (which lasted from 1874 to 1895), Emily Sadka notes that the Residential system devised by Sir Andrew Clarke who was the key figure in the Pangkor Engagement contravened the original philosophy of indirect rule: a powerful motive for indirect rule was a positive appreciation of traditional societies and the institutions which maintained them; and although the inevitability of change was admitted, the theory of indirect rule sought to regulate change by adapting indigenous institutions to new political and economic modes of action, instead of exposing them unprotected to the destructive impact of external forces. This conservative sentiment was absent from the ideas of Clarke and his advisers. When they wrote of teaching the Malays good government, they were not thinking in terms of development from Malay traditions and institutions. There is nothing to show that they put any


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value on these institutions, either for their own sake, or as a necessary context for Malay social growth. According to Clarke, ‘The Malays, like every other rude Eastern nation, require to be treated much more like children, and to be taught; and this especially in all matters of improvement, whether in the question of good government and organization, or of material improvement ...’ (Sadka, 1968: 52–3) In his comparative study of Swettenham and Clifford, J. de V. Allen states that the early Residents ‘represented an anachronism, a fossilization of an older form of imperial power within the new Empire’ and that their indirect rule in some important aspects was ‘wholly direct’8 (de V. Allen, 1964: 41, 50). He also describes these Residents as being ‘in the tradition, exemplified by the Brookes of Sarawak and terminating with Cromer in Egypt, of British gentlemen sent to put the houses of “natives” in order for them, and, ... the justice of such a mission was regarded at that time as self-evident’ (de V. Allen, 1964: 41). Conrad’s portrayal of Jim as the ‘virtual ruler’ sheds ironic light on the colonial version of the indirect rulers of the Malay world since Conrad calls a spade a spade. His ironic response to the colonial government’s insistence on the ‘indirect’ in Indirect Rule is embodied in Jim, whose rule is ‘wholly direct’ and who has made it his vocation and moral obligation to ‘put the houses of natives in order for them’. If Jim is acknowledged direct ruler, Doramin’s concern that his son, Dain Waris, should succeed Jim is a significant detail. In a typical Malay dynastic kingdom, accession to the throne was hereditary. Doramin’s ‘secret ambition’ (LJ 273) is for his heir to succeed Jim as if he halfexpects Jim to quit Patusan in due course. We are not told if Jim would ever grant Doramin’s ‘dreams of parental ambition’ (LJ 330). What we are told is that Jim would never leave Patusan, his raj. It is therefore ironic and even symbolic that both Jim and the ‘heir’ should be eventually sacrificed in the fray. Significantly, both the romantic white rajah and heirs of native kingdoms would pass into oblivion under the imminent shadow of the colonial state. With the consolidation of the colonial state, the jewels of private kingdoms were in fast-forward mode towards their eventual destinies. In one sense, Conrad is merely lamenting the demise of the pioneering, early Residential rulers and the passing of the Brookean white rajah. Indeed, with the ever-encroaching colonial state apparatus, white rajah Residents and ‘they-who-are-madelords’ would find it increasingly difficult to reign unperturbed over their private kingdoms. Collits argues that the Tuan Jim/Rajah Brooke motif evokes the afterglow of romantic desire for an imaginary lost


world where “glamour” is still possible’ and that ‘[a]lthough Jim turned out to be not quite a hero, Conrad’s own desultory hold on the possibility of heroism lasted until the final years of his life’ (Collits, 2005: 138). It can also be said that what Conrad ‘rescues’ in his fiction is a passing phase of imperialism itself, in which white rajahs were not averse to ‘going native’ in fulfilling their responsibilities over those they ruled. It can be argued that the succeeding generations of administrators were less free to do as they pleased in their districts. Conrad appears to have appreciated the romantic aspects of Residential rule. Like the sentimental Clifford, he expressed a solidarity with the ‘brown nations’ (Y 41), and highlighted the common history shared by both colonizer and colonized. J de V. Allen writes that Clifford ‘fastened on the notion then prevalent that the progression through feudalism to capitalism was natural and universal, and that the triumph of the latter was in some sense a victory of right over wrong. In the Malays’ ancien regime, [Clifford] stressed, was to be seen a remarkably exact counterpart (emphasis added) to the European feudalism of five or more centuries earlier. He believed that Britain’s role was to terminate the rule of the chiefs, “liberate” the people, and introduce a new order’ (de V. Allen, 1964: 58). The moral aspect of this argument (‘a victory of right over wrong’) is also evident in Conrad when he ponders over his Malays and sees the ‘moral character’ of their ‘silent and irresistible appeal’ (APR 9). Arguably, Conrad was not seeking to ‘terminate the rule of the chiefs’. If anything, his white protagonists were far too busy championing the cause of their chosen Malay rajahs and by extension, Malay society itself. However, preserving, advising, or ‘rescuing’ the monarchy did not always mean safeguarding their powers, as the Residential system would demonstrate only too starkly. In the democratic colonial nation-state, ‘self-rule’ conjures only the illusion of autonomy and self-determination. Like Clifford, Conrad was impressed by the unique relationship, blind fanatical obedience, and close links between the Malay Rajah and his subject. Consider Tamb’ Itam, whose ‘belief in his lord [is] so strong’ and who ‘has eyes only for one figure, and through all the mazes of bewilderment he preserves his air of guardianship, of obedience, of care’ (LJ 389). Clifford coveted this intimacy between ruler and subject and sought to cultivate this unique fealty between indirect ruler and subject in his life among the Malays. Clifford ‘did hope that the end of feudalism might not mean the victory of Western civilization; that the Residential system, with its (to him) perfect intimate relationship between ruler and subject, could somehow be perpetuated’ (de V. Allen, 1964: 61). Obviously, Clifford had incorrigibly romantic notions of the symbiosis between


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court (ruler) and kampong (ruled) and hence, the telling title of his book, In Court and Kampong. In Conrad’s fiction however, although Jim, too, inspires the ‘perfect intimate relationship between ruler and subject’, such a bond is not without its cost for as he says: ‘I am responsible for every life in the land’ (LJ 394). Jim’s execution for the death of Waris is the hefty and fatal price he pays for the allegiance of his subjects. With the demise of the ‘He who is made Lord’, the white raj comes to an abrupt end and so too Marlow’s chronicle of Jim. White rule in Patusan (direct or otherwise) ends as dramatically as it had begun and any romantic intimacy between the Tuan Putih and his subjects is relegated to the realm of the symbolic with Jim appearing more like a symbol than anything else. Jim’s unromantic death only proves him a mere mortal, vulnerable and devoid of any powers of invincibility. His kingship, based as it were on ‘bally rot’, is illusory, just as Marlow’s chronicle of Lord Jim is illusory. ‘Protection’ (in either the indirect or direct sense) in Conrad’s Malay world seems an elusive ideal because Western civilization is saddled with villainous and greedy Gentlemen Browns (along with bullies and ruffians like ‘Bully Hayes’ and ‘Dirty Dick’ [LJ 352]) of dubious motives who deny Jim’s romantic tale a happy ending (Gentleman Brown in Lord Jim is almost an allegorical figure as his ironic appellation suggests). Through the imagery of twilight (‘the half-submerged sun’ [LJ 335], ‘the declining light’ [LJ 260], etc.), Conrad makes the colonial ‘success story’ of Patusan symbolic of a dreamlike, romantic myth destined to fade into oblivion. So much so that it is at times difficult for even Marlow himself to be convinced of Jim’s existence.

The Mohammedan subject in Conrad’s Malay world The greatest danger to Dutch rule was in those areas in Sumatra, Borneo, and Celebes where the traditional rulers were still capable of opposition, where Islam was politically important, and where close commercial contact with Singapore was maintained. (Reid, 1966: 276) ‘We are going amongst a lot of Mohammedans’, he explained. (TR 288) What is this, O Muslims! ... Are they not cruel, bloodthirsty robbers bent on killing? (Lord Jim 391) In striving to give imaginative shape to his sense of a Malay identity and ethos, Conrad’s discourse is decidedly ambivalent: his rhetorical

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construct of the Malay frequently destabilizes his construct of the civilized European. This ambivalent, double register is especially evident in his treatment of the politicoreligious aspect of the Malay and constitutes a ‘surplus of seeing’. Conrad’s fiction allows us a glimpse into the East that goes beyond the discursive limitations of history since the narratives use the Malay (and Malayness) as a strategy to critique the West. The focus of this section is the interpellation of the Mohammedan subject in Conrad’s Malay world. In this imaginary space, the author may at times reconstitute the ‘facts’ but one fact which he accurately preserves is that the Malay is of course, a Mohammedan (the term commonly used at the time for the followers of Islam). In attempting to forge a political identity for his Malays, Conrad is not unaware that Malays, whether they were of Bugis, Sulu, or Javanese origins, were Mohammedans. Islam had arrived in the region in the twelfth century and had rapidly become the religion of choice for sultans, rajahs, and chieftains as well as their followers. In the nineteenth century (and even to some extent today), to embrace Islam was synonymous with entering Malaydom. ‘Every Malay was a Muslim. It was a national status as much as a religion. A convert to Islam was said to become a Malay (masuk Melayu)’ (Gullick, 1989: 277). Khoo writes: ‘Irrespective of what factors may be basic to the western concept of “nation”, to the Malays, the elements which contribute more significantly to their distinct identity have always been their culture, language and Islam’ (Khoo, 1991: 139). For the Malay, religion is an intrinsic part of identity, and Europeans had conflicting views of this phenomenon. Isabella Bird (1831–1904) observes wryly in The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither: ‘The Malays are bigoted, and for the most part ignorant and fanatical Mohammedans, and I fully believe that the Englishman whom they respect most is only a little removed from being “a dog of an infidel” ’ (Bird, 1990: 140). Frank Swettenham (1850–1948) begged to differ: ‘He is not a bigot’ (Swettenham, 1984: 5). Conrad himself did not offer a direct opinion of the Malay Mohammedan either in his letters or essays, but the fiction suggests that generally, his ‘gentlemanly’ Malayo-Muslims were benign and moderate9 believers unencumbered in the practice of their faith. Interestingly, Anthony Reid notes: Colonial statesmen had a clear idea of what sort of Malay they should protect. ... The real Malay of colonial discourse was rural, loyal to his ruler, conservative and relaxed to the point of laziness. ... The dominant element of the Malayan Civil Service took the view that its role


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was to protect the stereotyped Malay identity, not to change it. Clifford, the most sentimentally paternal of the governors, insisted as late as 1927, when effective power was wholly in British hands, that there must be no change in the Islamic monarchies, which Britain was sworn to protect.10 (Reid, 2002b: 17) This non-threatening stereotype of the Malay presumably extended to the Malay’s religious identity.11 In the fiction, the only instance of religious fundamentalism (perceived as anti-Dutch resistance) is a cursory reference to the Padris of Sumatra. In The Rescue, Jörgenson describes how Belarab’s father was a leader of the Padris. The Padris were behind the orthodox militant Islamic movement which had fought for a stricter observance of Islamic law or sharia among the Minangkabau and Batak in the nineteenth century and which had sought to rid the local Islamic practice of all pagan influences. Jorgenson relates his encounter with the puritanical Mohammedans to Lingard: Belarab’s father escaped with me, ... and joined the Padris in Sumatra. He rose to be a great leader. Belarab was a youth then. Those were the times. I ranged the coast – and laughed at the cruisers; I saw every battle fought in the Battak country – and I saw the Dutch run; I was at the taking of Singal and escaped. I was the white man who advised the chiefs of Manangkabo. (TR 102) Conrad’s romanticized and imaginary Malays are clearly Mohammedans, albeit depicted as possessing varying degrees of piety. Even the British reader with no knowledge at all of Malays (actual or fictional) will infer this from the texts, despite the numerous allusions to pagan beliefs in animism, superstition, and the occult. In the tales, there is a large category of Mohammedans whose syncretic blend of folk magic, superstition, and ‘Mohammedan usage’ (TR 74) results in a propensity to fetishize the ‘white lord’. In Patusan, even the ‘wisest shook their heads’ and were convinced of Jim’s ‘supernatural powers’ (LJ 266). The tales are also populated with returned pilgrims (hajis) and those on en route, invocations to Allah, and references to pilgrimage,12 the Holy Shrine, and the Koran. Conrad’s Malays revere Arabs and especially the syed, a male descendant of the Prophet himself. From Haji Wasub in The Rescue to Haji Babalatchi in Almayer’s Folly to Haji Saman in Lord Jim, returned pilgrims are in almost every major Malay story to come from Conrad’s pen.13 Haji Wasub, the boatswain of the Lightning, ‘had been twice a pilgrim, and was not insensible to the sound of his rightful title’ (TR 16).


In Conrad’s fictional Malay world, hajis are venerated and have a place in the political life of the Malays: Haji Saman’s ‘words had a great weight’ (LJ 362) among Patusan Muslims and that ‘holy man Ningrat’ (TR 172) in The Rescue is clearly a haji and an ulama.14 In the same novel, the mosque is a conspicuous structure in the settlement of ‘pious Belarab’ (TR 373) and Mrs. Travers recoils at the sight of ‘a man in a long white gown and with an enormous black turban surmounting a dark face. Slow and grave he paced the beach ominously in the sunshine, an enigmatical figure in an Oriental tale with something weird and menacing in its sudden emergence and lonely progress’ (TR 260). Significantly, Edith Travers epitomizes Western ignorance and a sentimental inclination to theatricalize her entire Eastern experience into ‘an Oriental tale’. As such, the novel exposes a typical Western/ Orientalist response which foregrounds the exotic spectacle (mosque, turbaned figure) in place of the intricacies of Malay politics. However, as GoGwilt argues, Mrs Travers’s misreading seems designed to ‘authenticate an imaginary native Malay identity’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 81) as presented in the text. Nevertheless, her sweeping summing-up of the political tensions and diplomatic stand-off on the Shore of Refuge is a tacit (although uncharacteristically insightful) acknowledgement that for the Malay (in history and Conrad’s fiction), politics and religion are not mutually exclusive: ‘Religion and politics – always politics’ (TR 367)! Religion and politics commingle again in Lord Jim where the piratical Sherif Ali’s white-cloaked emissaries raise the cry of jihad in the marketplace: ‘One of them stood forward in the shade of a tree, and, leaning on the long barrel of a rifle, exhorted the people to prayer and repentance, advising them to kill all the strangers in their midst, some of whom, he said, were infidels and others even worse – children of Satan in the guise of Moslems’ (LJ 295).

The pilgrim and the white man’s ‘magic’ In Conrad, the haji or returned pilgrim is metonymic of the faith itself and the believers are not always mute paper cut-outs, colourful ‘people in a book’ (LJ 260), or part of an iconic and impressionistic backdrop. True to Conrad’s double-writing, and notwithstanding the exoticism that a haji may embody, it is through the lens of occult-minded Mussulmen (who are at worst, ‘silly beggars’ [266] to an indulgent Jim) that an ironic commentary of the Tuan Putih (white master/lord) is framed. Almayer’s long-suffering servant, Ali, is often bewildered and dismayed by his master’s ‘strange doings’, concluding finally that the


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foolish Almayer ‘had turned sorcerer in his old age’ (AF 202). Almayer’s determination to forget his daughter, Nina, who had left him for her lover (thus crushing her father’s extravagant dreams of a splendid life with her in Europe) leads to despair and delirium. Ironically (though rather aptly), Ali reads his master’s rabid attempts to forget and physical decline as those of a man who had called up a malevolent and stubborn spirit and could not get rid of it: His master has turned sorcerer in his old age. Ali said that often when Tuan Putih had retired for the night he could hear him talking to something in his room. Ali thought that it was a spirit in the shape of a child. ... Master spoke to the child at times tenderly, then he would weep over it, laugh at it, scold it, beg of it to go away; curse it. It was a bad and stubborn spirit. Ali though his master had imprudently called it up, and now could not get rid of it. His master was very brave; he was not afraid to curse this spirit in the very Presence; and once he fought with it. (AF 202) In An Outcast of the Islands, the same Ali boasts knowledge of Lingard’s ‘occult’ powers to the watchman: The watchman hinted obscurely at powers of invisibility possessed by [Almayer], who often at night ... Ali interrupted him with great scorn. Not every white man has the power. Now, the Rajah Laut could make himself invisible. Also, he could be in two places at once, as everybody knew; ... . (OI 317) In Lord Jim, the Patna had been in the midst of transporting 800 pilgrims en route to Mecca when it collided with flotsam and sustained a breach in the hull. With few lifeboats, the Captain and his European crew disgracefully abandoned ship and passengers, the same pilgrims whom the boorish skipper had dismissed as ‘dese cattle’ (LJ 15). The Patna never sank and her crew was tried before a court of inquiry in which the ‘extraordinary and damning’ native helmsman called to the witness stand does not believe that Jim and company had jumped ship to save their own lives: ‘There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, ... he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years’ (LJ 98–9). ‘Secret reasons’ or not, the text emphasizes the sheer wrongness and cowardice of those who had reneged on their seamen’s code of conduct/

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honour and contrasts this against an almost inspiring account of Mohammedans admirably united and organized in their common desire to undertake ‘that pious voyage’ (LJ 15) in spite of hardship. The tribute below is worth citing in full: Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. They came from solitary huts in the wilderness, from populous campongs, from villages by the sea. At the call of an idea they had left their forests, their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their prosperity, their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the graves of their fathers. They came covered with dust, with sweat, with grime, with rags – the strong men at the head of family parties, the lean old men pressing forward without hope of return; young boys with fearless eyes glancing curiously, shy little girls with tumbled long hair; the timid women muffled up and clasping to their breasts, wrapped in loose ends of soiled head-cloths, their sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrims of an exacting belief. (LJ 14–15) In Conrad’s tales, the ‘exacting belief’ is ironically powerless to dispel the myth of the Tuan Putih’s invincibility and supernatural powers. However, Jim’s exasperation at the gullibility of some of his more simpleminded followers is marked not entirely by displeasure. To a large extent, their belief in his powers and invulnerability had legitimized his position as ‘the virtual ruler of the land’ (LJ 273). In The Rescue, there is an interesting discussion of Captain Tom Lingard among his Malay crew. The store-keeper intones: Have you heard him shout at the wind – louder than the wind? I have heard, being far forward. And before, too, in the many years I served this white man I have heard him often cry magic words that make all safe. Ya-wa! This is truth. Ask Wasub who is a Haji, even as I am. (TR 47) To this, a crewmember remarks that he has seen white men’s ships wrecked like their own praus. The store-keeper Haji answers sagaciously that the white men are all ‘the children of Satan but to some more


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favour is shown’ and that the charms such white men possess ‘protect his servants also’ (TR 48). Having sailed six years with Lingard, the defender of the white man’s magic claims ‘great knowledge of [Lingard’s] desires’ (TR 48). The implication appears to be that the white man’s actions and behaviour are mysterious, irrational, arcane and duplicitous and can therefore only be explained in the same terms. In ‘Karain: A Memory’, the cobbling together of the Jubilee coin charm by the white crew is done with full knowledge that the native would not balk at a pagan talisman. This not only destabilizes the authenticity of the ‘knowledge’ gleaned by the Malay from service with the white man (which does not change his superstitious or occult perception of the world but in fact, reinforces it) but also exposes the dubious ‘uses’ that the colonial knowledge of the Tuan Putih ‘who knew his Malays’15 (AF 318) is put to. The target of irony is twofold: the Malay-Mussulman and his belief in what Jim dismisses as ‘bally rot’ (LJ 266) and what Lingard ridicules as ‘these charm-words of mine’ (TR 202); and the strange, elusive motives of white men themselves. In ‘The End of the Tether’, the ingenuous lascar who overhears the ‘endless drunken gabble’ of the second engineer and the vulgar ranting of the odious Massy is ironically struck with amazement: His heart would be thumping with breathless awe of white men: the arbitrary and obstinate men who pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes – beings with weird intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, actuated by inscrutable motives. (Y 224) The Serang of the Sofala, who has served many years with ‘various white men on the sea’, had remained as incapable of penetrating the simplest motives of those he served as they themselves were incapable of detecting through the crust of the earth the secret nature of its heart. (Y 228) Foil to this category of believers who display a tendency to magnify the white man’s abilities in occult terms are those who demonstrate a faith in a state of philosophical flux. In ‘Karain: A Memory’, Karain’s ‘wizard’ is a Haji who is reluctant to play the shamanic role assigned to him as pre-Islamic practices might easily conflict with the teachings of the Prophet. ‘Karain: A Memory’ features a tale within a tale: the inner tale is narrated by Karain who tells three English gun-runners how he had betrayed and killed a friend and how this friend’s ‘ghost’ haunts and


terrifies him. The Haji had been entrusted with the task of protecting him and now that the Haji has died, Karain is vulnerable again. Here, he confesses to his listeners: You all knew [the Haji]. People here called him my sorcerer, my servant and sword-bearer; but to me he was father, mother, protection, refuge and peace. When I met him he was returning from a pilgrimage, and I heard him intoning the prayer of sunset. He had gone to the holy place with his son, his son’s wife, and a little child; and on their return, by the favour of the Most High, they all died: the strong man, the young mother, the little child – they died; and the old man reached his country alone. He was a pilgrim serene and pious, very wise and very lonely. I told him all. For a time we lived together. He said over me words of compassion, of wisdom, of prayer. He warded from me the shade of the dead. I begged him for a charm that would make me safe. For a long time he refused; but at last, with a sigh and a smile, he gave me one. (TU 42) Historically, the Haji’s rejection of magic and other pagan accretions (where seeking protection from jinn and the evil eye through the wearing of charms and amulets was common) signals a mood for theological reform and ferment which was in its infancy in the last 25 years of the nineteenth century.16 Significantly, after the death of his ‘sorcerer’, it is to the three white men (an unnamed narrator, Hollis and Jackson) that Karain implores: ‘ “Give me your protection – or your strength!” he cried. “A charm ... a weapon!” ’ (TU 45, ellipsis in original). Hollis exploits this great idea of the white man’s power to help the tormented Bugis war-chief (whom they assumed were not ‘very strict in his faith’ [TU 48]) subdue his ‘ghost’. The makeshift charm he fashions out of the Queen’s Jubilee coin and other knick-knacks becomes the lifesaver of the Malay whose belief in the white man’s powers is unshakable despite the latter’s ‘denials and protestations’ (AF 12). Read as allegory, ‘Karain: A Memory’ may be easily mistaken as an affirmation or triumph of empire. The Malay-Muslim whose ‘puritanism doesn’t shy at a likeness’ (TU 51) is liberated by the colonial charm. His deliverance by the power of the Queen’s image symbolizes a form of spiritual subjection to the Queen, the ‘Invincible, the Pious’ (TU 49). Nevertheless, it is an ambiguous victory: the England that the narrator and Jackson encounter some years after this episode is an illusory, infernal, and sombre setting, prompting Jackson to imagine an atavistic


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similarity between Karain’s dark, unreal ‘ghost’ story and the almost surreal sensory stimulation of ‘home’: the broken confusion of roofs, the chimney-stacks, the gold letters sprawling over the fronts of houses, the sombre polish of windows, stood resigned and sullen under the falling gloom. The whole length of the street, ... full of a sombre and ceaseless stir. Our ears were filled by a headlong shuffle and beat of rapid footsteps and an underlying rumour – a rumour vast, faint, pulsating, as of panting breaths, of beating hearts, of gasping voices. Innumerable eyes stared straight in front, feet moved hurriedly, blank faces flowed, arms swung ... A clumsy string of red, yellow, and green omnibuses rolled swaying, monstrous and gaudy; two shabby children ran across the road; a knot of dirty men with red neckerchiefs round their bare throats lurched along, discussing filthily; a ragged old man with a face of despair yelled horribly in the mud the name of a paper; ... (TU 54–5) As Stephen Donovan observes, ‘London constituted a phantasmagoric experience in its own right’ (Donovan, 2005: 33). In this viscerally disturbing environment, Jackson confesses that the London teeming and festering before his eyes does not seem real to him: ‘Yes; I see it, ... It is there; it pants, it runs, it rolls; it is strong and alive; it would smash you if you didn’t look out; but I’ll be hanged if it is yet as real to me as ... as the other thing ... say, Karain’s story’ (TU 55). The identification of London with an invidious, menacing beast suggests that the world of ‘the far-off Queen’ (TU 13), the ‘Great Queen’ (TU 49) regarded by Karain with ‘wonder and chivalrous respect – with a kind of affectionate awe’ (TU 13) is no different from the macabre world of the dead that Karain describes. Hollis’s ironic portrayal of the Queen as a superior ghost able to vanquish all other ghosts foreshadows the beast metaphor ascribed to the city: She commands a spirit, too – the spirit of her nation; a masterful, conscientious, unscrupulous, unconquerable devil ... that does a lot of good – incidentally ... a lot of good ... at times – and wouldn’t stand any fuss from the best ghost out for such a little thing as our friend’s shot. (TU 49–50, ellipses in original) David Adams notes that ‘Karain’s haunting problem is merely a projection of Britain’s own, his state a microcosm of the empire’ and that


‘Karain’ demonstrates that ‘the source of unrest lies closer to home, among the discontents of modernity’ (Adams, 2001: 741–2). Eloise Knapp Hay asserts that ‘[i]n both Lord Jim and Youth, the hero imagines the “East” towards which he sails as an escape from prosaic or oppressive conditions in the West’ (Hay, 1993: 24). Victoria, whose likeness is engraved on the coin, while symbolizing the nation’s progress, is also a condensed symbol of the malaise, remorse, burdens, and fatigue of home (along with the ghosts of the past and the dead). Conrad ‘[projects the malaise] onto Malayan Karain and his kingdom so that ... uncomfortable truths can come to light’ (Adams, 2001: 742). In his study of how the crisis at home is also one of masculinity, Andrew Michael Roberts concludes that ‘the visions of the chaos of London streets and the threatening crowd of modernity suggest the repressed unconscious of imperial discourse: the crises and transformations of class and gender relations in Britain’ (Roberts, 2000: 61). In ‘Karain: A Memory’, the pessimistic critique of the simultaneously ‘conscientious, unscrupulous, unconquerable devil’ of nation, empire, and Western civilization (represented by the gloomy and chaotic metropolis) is underscored by the troubling suggestion that the civilized Unbeliever is not far removed from the savage Believer.17 In the cabin of the schooner (itself a symbol of Western progress), the uneasy narrator sees Hollis’s collection of miscellaneous knick-knacks (a bit of ribbon, needles, etc.) and discerns: ‘Amulets of white men! Charms and talismans! ... All the ghosts driven out of the unbelieving West by men who pretend to be wise and alone and at peace – all the homeless ghosts of an unbelieving world’ (TU 48). GoGwilt argues that Hollis’s makeshift charm projects ‘an alienated image of their own culture to the white sailors’ since it is cobbled hastily out of various meaningless, discrete objects and is ‘part Catholic, part folk, part symbol of the British Empire’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 61). However, like the Mohammedan and his part Islamic, part folk practices, the charm also serves to imply an ironic homogeneity between ‘one of us’ and ‘one of them’. In Lord Jim, it is also ironic that Jim, son of a parson and therefore part of the ‘unbelieving West’ should find redemption from the ‘ghost’ of his guilt among the ‘lot of Mohammedans’ in his kingdom. Nevertheless, whatever romantic or disturbing similarities that may link the ‘picture of life, there as here’ (which constitutes ‘the same picture’ [NB 4]), are effectively imploded by the native and white man’s stereotyping of each other, a labelling which is tellingly enough based on reciprocity: the Malay-Muslim is one who seeks and turns Western symbols into charms and the Tuan Putih is one who fulfils


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the native’s need for charms. That this discourse of difference is articulated through the native’s own words and thoughts is no less significant since it ‘authenticates’ the white man’s ironic ‘understanding’ of the native that ‘the greater the lie the more they seem to like it’ (LJ 266). In Lord Jim, the ‘chief men of the town’ lack confidence in their Bugis prince, Dain Waris, because they thought: He had not Jim’s racial prestige and the reputation of invincible, supernatural power. He was not the visible, tangible incarnation of unfailing truth and of unfailing victory. Beloved, trusted, and admired as he was, he was still one of them, while Jim was one of us. Moreover, the white man, a tower of strength in himself, was invulnerable, while Dain Waris could be killed. (LJ 361, emphasis in original) On the whole though, as far as Mohammedans and other characters are concerned, ‘no one group is idealized; rather our sense is of a succession of displacements and power struggles, internally and externally fuelled by a common human greed’ (White, 1993: 187). This greed transcends race, culture, and creed: the powerful Malays and Arabs of Sambir are hoping that Almayer would lead them to the fabled treasure farther inland, the same rumoured gold that Lingard was supposed to have discovered. Ultimately, Nina Almayer’s reflection that avarice, overweening ambition, hypocrisy, and unscrupulousness afflict all humanity regardless of faith is pertinent to our reading of Conrad’s Malay: Whether they traded in brick godowns or on the muddy river bank; ... ; whether they plotted for their own ends under the protection of laws and according to the rules of Christian conduct, or whether they sought the gratification of their desires with the savage cunning and the unrestrained fierceness of natures as innocent of culture as their own immense and gloomy forests, Nina saw only the same manifestations of love and hate and of sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its multifarious and vanishing shapes. (AF 43) However, an aporia betrays certain racist assumptions evident in the idea that although humanity is fundamentally the same, Christianity is in binary relation with savagery and culture with nature. At a deeper level, the text does not quite subvert the privileged term in spite of authorial intentions to the contrary. It is also significant that, in embracing Malayness, the infidel Nina disassociates her ‘Malay kinsmen’ (AF 43)

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from their Mohammedan identity; her reversion to savagery is directed to a Malayness that is identified not with Islam but with a pre-Islamic ethos of ‘savage glories’, ‘barbarous fights’, and ‘savage feasting’ (AF 42). Notably, just as her savage mother, a Catholic convert, had a ‘little brass cross’ (AF 41) on which to fix her superstitious eye and pagan streak, religion (whether Christianity or Islam) had been reduced to a ‘theological outfit’ (AF 41) of charms, talismans, myths and strains of religiosity void of any genuine spiritual depth. In the words of the disturbed narrator in ‘Karain: A Memory’: Amulets of white men! Charms and talismans! Charms that keep them straight, that drive them crooked, ... . (TU 48) Finally, Conrad’s rhetoric seems to suggest wryly that the one true faith (in a world of external religious trappings) which unites Arabs, Malays, and Unbelievers is the servitude to Mammon. As we have also seen, Conrad’s Malays are undoubtedly practising Muslims, but the extent of their faith seems a throwback to a pre-Islamic culture of magic, charms, and occult beliefs. However accurate this representation may be in reflecting the state of the Faith among Malays at that particular time in history, Conrad seems to portray the Malay whose occult beliefs support his allegiance to his ‘supernatural’ (and therefore ‘legitimate’18) lord. The trouble with this portrayal of occultminded Mohammedans is that it discursively perpetuates a form of spiritual stagnation and backwardness. Hajis or returned pilgrims who have become religiously heightened and less inclined to hold on to folk practices seem to be the exception rather than the rule as Karain’s ‘sorcerer’ demonstrates (although Haji Saman in Lord Jim may also qualify: he displays modernity and intellect in his rational call for the use of ‘proper stratagems’ [LJ 362] in dealing with the enemy). Conrad’s depiction of ‘mild’ Muslims seems to support the general view that Islamic reformist attitudes (generally associated with anticolonial sentiments) were not serious enough then to be considered a real threat to British rule, if at all. Nevertheless, in the fiction, the Arab also wields ‘great occult power’ (TSL 6) among the local Malays, presenting the colonized with an alternative centre of authority and prestige and posing a tacit challenge to the colonizer, which the next chapter discusses. To sum up, in Conrad’s humanist discourse, the othering of the Malay Mohammedan doubles as a counter-gaze into the hollowness of the Infidel’s self. Conrad’s image of the Malay Mohammedan also unsettles


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his national narrative in that the idea of British moral and cultural supremacy is eroded by a sense of sameness rather than difference between Believers and Unbelievers. All in all, Conrad’s representation of the Malay Mohammedan is a searingly ironic response to colonialism’s self-image as a bastion of civilization and moral prestige.

3 The Rest of That Pantai Band

‘ “It has set at last”, said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills behind which the sun had sunk’ ... These words of Almayer’s romantic daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rested on the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan isles, and shaped themselves in my mind, in an hallucinated vision of forests and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town of the northern hemisphere. (APR 3) Twilight is a favourite time of day in Conrad’s (1857–1924) Eastern settings. The period of decline in the Malay domination of their world went hand in hand with the emerging mob of the ‘others’ other than the indigenous peoples of the archipelago. Bound by the treaties signed with the Malay rulers, the British were obliged to ‘protect’ the prestige of the court and the interests of the Malays. For Hugh Clifford (1866–1941), ‘this huge moral-forcing system which [Britain called] “Protection” ’ (Clifford, 1989a: 5) was justified because ‘the vast bulk of the Malays have attained to a measure of contentment and happiness unprecedented in their history, and it is upon this contentment and this happiness that the British administration stands four-square, broadbased upon a people’s will’ (Clifford, 1983: 265). In fact, British intervention in the Malay world and the subsequent change in the old order were regarded as instrumental in the ‘regeneration’ of the race. It would not be too far-fetched to say that the early Residents saw themselves as saviours. With their benevolent help and their brand of benign autocracy, the Malay race would be transported from a backward, medieval feudalism to the industrial age and could progress and benefit from the trappings of European civilization. For Conrad in the last two decades 104

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of the nineteenth century, the sunset of the Malay world was a fact and the Malayan Golden Age could only be a ‘hallucinated vision of forests and rivers and seas’ (APR 3) where white heroism once prevailed. Nevertheless, ‘Protection’, as Rupert Emerson writes, really meant the preservation of big business, capital, and the laissez faire policy in which the Europeans, Chinese, Arabs, Malay nobles, and other mercantile groups had a vested interest. Conrad’s fictional world encompasses these groups but they exist only to intensify the illusion of Conrad’s particular East. In tandem with the colonial state, an inchoate society had begun to emerge and grow. This so-called ‘British Malayan’ community is a purely illusory entity because although non-Europeans could claim membership in the state or citizenship, this was not necessarily an automatic assumption of British ‘nationality’ and the full privileges that entailed. Thus, while Jim-Eng, Syed Abdulla, and Cornelius may be Straits-born or colonial-born British subjects, they did not belong to the British ‘nation’. ‘Nationality’, as Conrad wryly recognized, is a highly contestable concept. In Almayer’s Folly, for Jim-Eng to claim British citizenship was acceptable and legal, but for him to claim ‘whiteness’ was bewildering. The confusion between what constituted ‘nationality’ for the colonizer and the colonized, this ‘harping on nationality’ (V 126), is a crucial pillar holding up Conrad’s ‘hallucinated vision’, a vision characterized by obscurity and opacity rather than clarity and explicitness and presented as such. In this chapter, I explore Conrad’s treatment of the other sections of colonial society,1 namely the largely immigrant Chinese and Arab groups as well as the Eurasians who had become a source of colonial unease. Conrad’s fictional version highlights a world which is fraught with uncertainty and ambiguity, especially for the ‘protectors’ who have conquered and appropriated this world. Our reading of history reveals in greater detail why European relations with non-Malays were volatile and problematic. In this chapter, I highlight ‘the rest of that Pantai band’ (APR 9) who supply the racialized bodies objectivized in colonial discourse. In conversation with history, Conrad’s Malay tales reveal much of the dynamics of the rise of the colonial state in Southeast Asia. What must have seemed obvious to him is that the romantic white rajahs and the East he desired to salvage were incompatible with the fast-encroaching colonial state and its administrative strictures, and can only be the stuff of hallucination, romantic ‘rescue work’ (NLL 13). Conrad does not only engage in rescuing the key players, namely the Malays and Europeans, but also the rest of the band: ‘Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes’ (LJ 13) who make up the ‘bronze, yellow faces’ (Y 41) of the

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Eastern crowd. The motivating factor for this rescue work seems to be a moral obligation towards a common humanity as the following passage demonstrates: It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico square that they first began to live again with a vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue. Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my table, and then the rest of that Pantai band came full of words and gestures. ... it was my practice directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of Malays, Arabs and half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my attention. They came with silent and irresistible appeal – and the appeal, I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth? (APR 9) The appearance of these beings, ‘full of words and gestures’, suggests an implicit demand for representation and an appeal to be represented as nothing less than human in the fiction. On another note, the colonial state’s attempt to profile and contain the ambiguous identities of the teeming crowds must have provided perfect fodder for Conrad’s tales. His fictional treatment of ‘the rest of that Pantai band’ rings with irony and exposes the follies and foibles of the colonial state in its attempt to delineate and reinscribe the identities of its subjects.

The colonial state and John Chinaman, a ‘first-class Chinaman’ (OI 181) The Chinese are everything: they are actors, acrobats, artists, musicians, chemists and druggists, clerks, cashiers, engineers, architects, ... cultivators of pepper and gambier, ... merchants and agents, ... opium shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, ... rice dealers, ship chandlers, shopkeepers, ... carpenters, ... seamen, ... grocers, beggars, idle vagabonds or samsengs and thieves. (Vaughan, 1974: 15)


To the famous testament of Chinese adaptability by J.D. Vaughan (who listed more than a hundred occupations the Chinese were engaged in), might be added, quite without prejudice: ‘the Chinese are everywhere’. To reflect this, in Conrad’s East, the Chinese are ‘everything’ and in almost every tale: from Wang who is Number Two on Samburan in Victory to ‘a Chinaman who keeps a small shop’ (LJ 287) in Patusan and the ‘bland Chinaman who cooked’ (LJ 356) for Brown’s crowd of ne’erdo-wells. In almost every establishment, from Patusan to Hudig’s counting-house to Schomberg’s hotel to the Sofala where an ‘opiumfuddled’ (Y 267) Chinese carpenter eked out his living, ‘China boys’ (Y 283), be they waiters, cooks, tellers, labourers, rickshaw-pullers, stokers, or boatmen are ubiquitous. Historically, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Chinese exodus to the Malay Archipelago had reached immense proportions. C.M. Turnbull records that 50,000 landed in 1880, 200,000 in 1900, and 250,000 in 1912 (Turnbull, 1977: 97). Although they were considered ‘transients’ with a few returning to China after making their money (consider the 200 homeward-bound ‘Celestials’ in ‘Typhoon’), many, many more would settle in their new ‘homes’ while not quite relinquishing ties with the motherland. Victor Purcell states that many did not return ‘mostly because they were too poor to return but some because they were too rich and dared not leave their property and their interests’ (Purcell, 1948: 86). Yen Ching-hwang notes that ‘[a]ccording to Seah Eu Chin,2 only ten percent of these sinkhehs (meaning literally, “new guests,” that is, “newcomers”) were able to fulfil their dreams of returning to China with some savings in the mid-nineteenth century’ (Yen, 1995: 9). Things changed in the 1920s and 1930s, though, when almost all returned home and were deemed labourers in transit. The Bun Hin Company’s coolies in ‘Typhoon’ were the lucky handful who made it home, although their perilous voyage to Fu-Chau symbolizes the rough ride that scores of overseas Chinese had had to endure in the Nanyang (the Southern Seas). The extreme hardship that many had to face was aggravated by their addiction to opium3 and resultant poverty. This abject poverty resulted in their inability to leave the colonies. At the other end of the spectrum were the affluent Chinese who had made their fortunes and become upwardly mobile along Confucian lines in terms of class and social status. This group was very small compared to the crowds of labourers, artisans, peddlers, and menial workers but it is also represented in Conrad’s tales: for instance, Davidson’s ship-owning Chinaman (the owner of the Patna is also Chinese) and Jim-Eng who is the opium farmer-cum-trader of Sambir. Apart from the newcomers,


there were also those whose ancestors had been domiciled in the Malay world for more than a century, namely the Straits Chinese. Carl Trocki notes: For European observers, one of the most enduring nineteenth-century images of the Chinese, whether in China or in Southeast Asia, was that of the opium wreck. The hollow-eyed, emaciated Oriental stretched out on his pallet, pipe in hand, stood as the stereotype of Asiatic decadence and indulgence. He was the icon of all that was beyond the pale of Christian morality and human decency. (Trocki, 1990: 1) In Conrad’s East, the opium wreck takes the form of Jim-Eng, an iconic symbol of his degenerate race of drug-users. Although of course, less pious Malays also took opium: Rajah Allang is said to ‘[swallow] an opium pill every two hours’ (LJ 228). Heliéna Krenn proposes that Conrad used allusions to Chinese individuals as a subtle device to reveal the character of the Europeans making these allusions, either positive or negative. She also suggests that [i]nsofar as – like the subjects of his narratives – the Chinese are obscure, mysterious, and of a doubtful nature to Westerners, they are in danger of being wrongly seen and misunderstood. The oral mode of presentation of narrative details, which is characteristic of Conrad’s stories, enables the author to forestall misinterpretations of what is shadowy and enigmatic in his tales by allowing for rival versions to what any one speaker puts forward at any one time. (Krenn, 1995: 93) Besides being a subtle ironic device, the Chinese junkie in Conrad’s fiction mirrors historical ‘fact’. The opium-addicted Chinaman was a very real phenomenon in the British colonies. Trocki remarks, ‘If the estimates of numerous nineteenth-century commentators are even approximately correct, nearly two-thirds of all Singapore Chinese were regular users’ (Trocki, 1990: 63). Among the Nanyang Chinese in the nineteenth century, opium-taking was not stigmatized. Opium had become a common substance, a major item of consumption not unlike social beverages like tea or coffee. Yen Ching-hwang states that ‘opium-smoking was well integrated into the social system of the Chinese community’ (Yen, 1995: 149). What is more pertinent to our present study are the links between colonialism and opium and the moral and ‘national’


implications thereof. Conrad’s stereotype of the opium wreck points to a much larger historical picture even if this information did circulate outside the text. If John Chinaman was the drug addict, John Company was the drug dealer. At its heart, Conrad’s portrayal of the Chinese reflects the colonizers’ unease with this segment of society, especially with regard to the cultural ‘infection’ that opium posed to Europeans themselves. The irony is startlingly forceful in that for an empire which is virtually built on opium, the substance is considered completely incompatible with ‘white’ culture. Conrad also hints at the deep British admiration for the Straits Chinese: their capacity as creators of wealth and their cultural adaptability and ambiguity (‘by descent Chinese, by culture Sino-Malay and by political allegiance British’ [Clammer, 1979: i]) were well noted and rewarded. Many of these ‘first-class Chinamen’ (OI 181) were bestowed with medals and other accolades of the British Empire. In the fiction, their identification with ‘whiteness’ is contrasted against that of weak and would-be Europeans represented by Almayer. Conrad also critiques the feeble white man who believes himself above the Celestial in the areas of self-restraint and moral integrity. The notion of ‘whiteness’ in Conrad is destabilized as a flimsy construct: the Chinaman’s ‘whiteness’, while justified in terms of the Chinaman’s economic power and Europeanization, is tacitly disavowed when opium enters the picture. The text wryly notes that ‘perhaps [Almayer’s] white man’s pride saved him from that degradation’ (AF 28–9). In tracing the history of the Chinese in the Malay world, Trocki writes that, ‘[w]hen the British arrived in the Malay world, everywhere they found the Chinese, they were grouped in kongsis’ (Trocki, 1990: 13). Wang in Victory seems to be the exception and even Heyst is startled by his uncharacteristic, voluntary seclusion from the ‘coolies, as a body’ (V 179): Of the crowd of imported Chinese labourers, one at least had remained in Samburan, solitary and strange, like a swallow left behind at the migrating season of his tribe. Wang was not a common coolie. (V 178) Furthermore, Trocki tells us that the history of the Nanyang Chinese is the history of the kongsi. The kongsi was an economic brotherhood, league, partnership, or company in which every member was a shareholder. Kongsis were set up around an economic enterprise, say mining or agriculture and each had its own internal hierarchical and

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organizational structure. There were kongsis for labourers and for merchants, as well as surname kongsis, in which the needs of a particular clan were taken care of. Just as the EIC and the VOC were the organized ‘vehicles of European migration or expansion’ the kongsi was ‘the vehicle of Chinese immigration’ (Trocki, 1990: 27) albeit with no state apparatus or royal charter behind it. Over the course of their existence and because of comparisons made between them and the secret society triads in China, these kongsis were often associated with secret rituals and secret societies and very often chastised by the colonial authorities for illicit and criminal activities. However, their role in state-building was indisputable. The final link in the chain connecting the colonial state, opium, and the kongsi is the opium tax farm. Chinese participation in the colonial economy had spawned a formidable league of revenue farmers in both the Dutch and British ‘spheres’. The practice of farming out or franchising the collection of taxes (that is state revenue in the form of consumption and production taxes) was widespread in colonial Southeast Asia. Even sovereign, indigenous Malay states like Johor made use of tax farmers in lieu of their own aristocrats. In fact, it was the Temenggongs of Johor who first introduced a farming system which licensed pepper and gambier planters as well as miners to open up new river valleys and settlements for their coolies.4 Most of the individuals who succeeded in bidding for the tax farms were Chinamen who eventually constituted the business élite. Farmers who successfully bid for the rights to monopolize the retail of certain goods and services (like opium and spirits) would pay the state a monthly rent which was in effect tax or revenue for the state. Under the ‘Opium Farming’ system, ‘the colonial governments monopolized the supply of raw opium (sold at a fixed price), but leased the right of preparing and distributing the cooked opium (Chandu) to some wealthy Chinese’ (Yen, 1995: 151). These wealthy Chinese were also kongsi headmen. John Butcher writes that most farmers were Chinese because ‘the Chinese were the only people who had the organization, knowledge and capital to operate the larger farms. In any case, in many areas Chinese became revenue farmers precisely because they exercised great political power, often as leaders of secret societies’ (Butcher, 1993: 24). To an extent, the kongsis were built around the tax farms. Revenue was also derived from other sources such as liquor, gambling, pawnbroking, logging, salt, tobacco, pork, fish, edible birds’ nests, and even betelnut farms, but the opium farm was the most lucrative by far. It is Howard Dick’s belief that


revenue farming was ‘a nexus between the state and the business élite at a critical juncture in Southeast Asia’s modern history’: The late nineteenth century was a period when the state, whether indigenous or colonial, was beginning to centralize power and take on the character and functions of the modern, rational-bureaucratic state. The need for greatly increased revenue, at a time when its bureaucracy was still weak, brought about an alliance of convenience with the local business elite, then still predominantly Chinese. Around the turn of the century, as the state gained confidence in its administrative capability while the Chinese were displaced from the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, that alliance broke down and the institution [of revenue farming] was abandoned. Revenue farming was therefore a transitional institution, but the circumstances of its rise and fall reveal a great deal about the dynamics of both the state and the Chinese business elite, as well as about the changing relations between them. Like a prism, the institution refracts a historical experience into a spectrum of issues that can be seen in new ways. (Dick, 1993a: 3) Trocki asserts that opium was the economic mainstay of nineteenthcentury Singapore. In fact, without the opium revenue and capital, there would be no colonial state to speak of. Without the Chinese opium farmers, the day-to-day socio-economic functioning of the free port would be adversely affected for ‘[t]he mechanism for profiting from opium consumption was the opium farm’ (Trocki, 1990: 69): For the first century of the colony’s existence, this privately held concession was responsible for the lion’s share of the state’s locally collected revenue. It rarely accounted for less than 40 percent and often made up over 60 percent. In other words, Raffles’s liberal, capitalist Singapore not only created the opium-smoking Chinese coolie; it literally lived on his back. He paid for free trade. (Trocki, 1990: 2) It is no wonder then that ‘opium farms and farmers played similarly important roles as agents of the colonial process’ (Trocki, 1990: 6). In relation to this, the Chinese kongsi is inextricably linked to the revenue farmers (whether they are those of opium, spirits, or rice, etc.). Often, it is the powerful leaders or headmen of these kongsis who became revenue farmers, on account of their political clout within these organizations.

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The state really had no option but to grant the concessions to these powerful leaders known as the Kapitan China. In Dutch Makassar, Hudig’s ‘quiet deal in opium’ (OI 8) suggests smuggling, a clandestine activity which only confirms the fact that the opium farms were not in Dutch hands before 1894. Ironically, it seems that it was the VOC which first introduced the European version of revenue farming to Southeast Asia. Kapitein itself is a Dutch word, denoting a ‘headman’, the ‘representative of a community’. Nevertheless, the Chinese opium farms in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) collapsed in the late 1880s and were, in 1894, replaced gradually by the state-run opium regie.5 The main action of An Outcast of the Islands takes place in about 1870, before the opium regie was installed. In the British ‘sphere’, the government monopoly for the manufacture and distribution of opium took effect in 1910. In a sense, the opium tax farm business and the kongsis which flourished along with it were not allowed to survive as they had grown too powerful and dangerous. Unsurprisingly, T.J. Newbold, colonial administrator and eminent Orientalist, saw the kongsis as a threat to British power (Trocki, 1990: 20). Dick contends that Even more of a sticking point was the implicit equality between European official and Chinese revenue farmer. While this was acceptable in more leisurely days before telegraphs and steamships, it was unsustainable in the Age of Imperialism. ‘Natives’ might be allowed the trappings of power but they were no longer trusted with real power. Nevertheless, the process by which the institution [of revenue farming] evolved and then so quickly atrophied reveals a great deal about the dynamics of change both within the state and within the business élite as well as the shifting balance of power between them. (Dick, 1993a: 8, emphasis added) The state had once depended almost solely on the farming syndicates to power its mechanism. John Chinaman was running these tax-collection operations and it is truly ironic that the Chinaman’s once crucial and powerful role as the unheralded buttress of the colonial state would be mainly forgotten and his role increasingly downplayed at the turn of the twentieth century. The same picture emerges in the NEI where the ‘opium farms were the key to Chinese dominance of the commanding heights of the Netherlands Indies economy’ (Dick, 1993b: 272) and where a ‘growing sinophobia among Europeans was reinforced by the rise of a group of very rich Chinese, known to have made most of


their money as revenue farmers, who lived in mansions outside the Chinese compounds and ostentatiously displayed their wealth’ (Diehl, 1993: 201). The Chinamen are not unlike the ‘wasted lives’ of ‘obscure adventurers’ (TR 4) commemorated in the Lingard trilogy who ‘if they emerged from their obscurity it was only to be condemned as law-breakers’ (TR 4). There was the near-monolithic idea that the business eìlite were members of kongsi and secret triad societies engaged in gangsterism and other illicit activities. Thus, when Conrad alluded to the ‘lawlessness’ of the East, he could also be reinforcing the myth of the unruly Chinese associated with organized crime. On the other hand, in his portrayal of an opium addict like Jim-Eng, the stereotype image is underscored by the discourse of ‘nation’ exemplified when Jim-Eng declares himself an Englishman or a British subject. What is suggested is the complicity and mutually beneficial cooperation between the colonial state (directly funded by Chinese opium farms and, indirectly, by opium smokers) and the Chinese business élite (represented by Jim-Eng). Jim-Eng, we note, is not just a private opium consumer or even an opium shopkeeper, but the opium revenue farmer of Sambir with the monopoly for the preparation and distribution of smokable opium, as his six cases of opium prove. Six cases or chests are a substantial supply, each chest weighing 140 pounds and each worth over a thousand Spanish dollars (Trocki, 1990: 54–6). Opium packaged in chests is raw and it would take a revenue farmer with the proper implements and labour to manufacture cooked, refined opium. The ‘government’ Jim-Eng collaborates with is Lingard who had declared that ‘[his] word is law – and [he is] the only trader’ (OI 43); however, the Lakamba faction eyes the expropriated trade and revenue jealously. Consider Babalatchi’s indignant protest: ‘Was [Lingard] a government’ (OI 115)? Lingard is, in all likelihood, a farmer himself, appointed by Patalolo. The licence to trade and to monopolize trade in important commodities was basically the licence to collect state revenue. The local traders grumble over Lingard’s monopoly: ‘They had to trade with him – accept such goods as he would give – such credit as he would accord. And he exacted payment every year’ (OI 116). By the end of the Lingard trilogy, however, Lingard’s monopoly had been wrested from him by Syed Abdulla bin Selim. With Rajah Patalolo, Lingard’s ‘old friend’ (OI 43), dead and the Arabs and Dutch-backed Lakamba in power, Almayer’s trading privileges were as good as over. Seen in this light, Jim-Eng’s tacit capacity as an agent of imperialism and the implicit equality between white and yellow, explain his wilful

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identification with whiteness: ‘We white men’ (OI 182). Not China-born but Straits-born, he identifies himself with the British (‘Said he was an Englishman’) and with the perceived authority and mastery shared among white men: ‘They are only black fellows. We white men, ... can fight everybody in Sambir’ (182). In ‘Because of the Dollars’, Davidson’s gentlemanly Chinaman is so closely identified with his British employee that ‘you couldn’t tell if it was Davidson who belonged to the Chinaman or the Chinaman who belonged to Davidson’ (WTT 150). Lingard’s superlative praise of the Chinaman is suggestive of the latter’s indispensable role in the colonial state as the creator of wealth even as his drugravaged body at the end suggests the inevitable erosion and displacement of that role as the state began to dispense with medieval forms of tax collection: ‘[Jim-Eng] was my passenger; I brought him here,’ exclaimed Lingard. ‘A first-class Chinaman that’ (OI 181). The ‘Jim’ in ‘Jim-Eng’ seems to echo the regard that the colonial government had for its economic stalwarts: the opium farmers and the crowds of opium users in the colonies enriching the state’s coffers. This Chinese ‘Jim’ is, however, ‘not one of us’. In Almayer’s Folly, the image of two opium-smoking partners, Jim-Eng and Almayer, suggests an ironic equality between white man and Celestial. Almayer’s initial determination not to stoop to the debased level of the opium junkie Oriental (‘perhaps his white man’s pride saved him from that degradation’ [AF 28–9]) is undermined: Jim-Eng moves into the folly, and the two ‘white men’ are finally ‘equals’ in the ‘house of heavenly delight’, both of them smoking opium. One could say that the two are also marked for similar racial/national identity because identity has been reduced to the ‘performance’ of certain acts, for instance, smoking opium and moving house. The folly can also be seen as a replica of the state in which John Company/Jan Compagnie’s collusion with John Chinaman is a cause for unease, a case of being too close for comfort. After all, the ‘Folly’ was built for the state, with the engineers of the state-sponsored North Borneo Company specifically in mind. In any event, the Celestials would be unceremoniously evicted from this ‘heavenly’ house despite the fact that it had ‘plenty of room’ (AF 205). Barry Milligan observes that in nineteenth-century Britain, the fear that Oriental elements could enter and infect domestic culture like a virus was deeply entrenched. Closely associated with the Chinese, opium was a particularly dreaded contaminant. Opium-smoking in Victorian and late-Victorian England was not unknown and created


the anxiety that the exalted national identity was no longer stable or predictable: Just as the opium smoke enters the smoker’s body, permanently altering the cells and restructuring the smoker’s identity, so do foreign elements introduced into a culture become part of that culture, restructuring the national identity until what were previously perceived as rigidly divided cultures are now inseparable. (Milligan, 1995: 117) Thus Almayer’s dread of succumbing to opium is fundamentally a socio-cultural identity crisis: his ‘white man’s pride’ (AF 28) is at stake as he risks going native. Ford takes one look at Almayer’s compromised self and flees; the former’s English sensibilities and firmness shaken at the thought of opium’s insinuation into one’s culture and identity. Although the Indo-European Almayer is only remotely ‘European’ and decidedly not ‘one of us’, he rigorously thinks and behaves as a culturally competent European and his capitulation to opium may constitute a displaced ‘British’ fear as Ford’s recoil tellingly demonstrates. Opiumconsumption identified the ‘firm’ (AF 204) British identity with its Oriental Other, undermining white superiority and stability as a moralforcing, forward movement in the Far East: The late nineteenth century’s wariness of the opium den, then, is inseparable from simultaneous anxieties about the imperial process. Britons at the end of the century felt a growing awareness that the British Empire could no longer be viewed as an entity in which the home culture of England simply overwrote the Oriental culture of the colonies, nor could ‘British culture’ or even ‘British identity’ be taken for granted as stable, objective essences. Instead, they began to realize, the British Empire must be viewed as an unpredictable multinational entity at every level from nation to individual and from the outposts in the colonies to the hearthsides in London. (Milligan, 1995: 117) In the outpost of Sambir, this ‘unpredictable multinational entity’ found its way into Almayer’s ‘domestic rice-pot’ (AF 59). When Jim-Eng moves into the Folly, that house built expressly for the British, his taking up of residence symbolizes the blending or blurring of national and even racial identities. For observers like Ford and even Ali, Jim-Eng’s

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assimilation into the ‘British’ house signifies the vilest sort of contagion. The would-be Europeans, Almayer and Jim-Eng, are now ‘partners’ in every ironic sense, economic, cultural, and national: two ‘Celestials’ languish in the ‘House of Heavenly Delight’.

Model colonists and entrepreneurs In Conrad’s tales, the tax farmer, Jim-Eng, is representative of that community of ‘first-class [Chinamen]’ (OI 181) lauded not only by Lingard but by the British administration. As model colonists and entrepreneurs, John Chinaman’s discourse of ‘Britishness’ may constitute an affront to the ‘true’ British identity but his comprador status as the producer of much-needed capital and revenue for the state, somehow, in his own eyes, warranted his identification with Britishness. Furthermore, the prestige of the British Empire and culture, propagated by the British themselves, was an attractant to the adaptable Chinese: he saw himself entering its fold and benefiting from such an alliance the way he had embraced Malaydom in the precolonial days of Malay dominance. The relationship between tax farmers and the state reveals the margins and fault lines of colonial power/authority. A fabulously rich Chinese farmer with too much affluence and influence in his community may make the state jittery. Many of these Chinese tycoons were Straits-born; these Straits Chinaman (in local parlance, Babas) were seen to be mimicking British culture. His avid Europeanization was simultaneously flattering and disturbing. Quoting Shakespeare and Byron, he built European homes for himself; a few were awarded the C.M.G. Vaughan writes that the Straits Chinese despise the real Chinamen6 and are exclusive fellows indeed; nothing they rejoice in more than being British subjects. The writer has seen Babas on being asked if they were Chinamen bristle up and say in an offended tone ‘I am not a Chinaman, I am a British subject, an Orang putih’, literally, a white man; ... . They have social clubs of their own ... . At these clubs they play at billiards, bowls, and other European games, and drink brandy and soda ad libitum. (Vaughan, 1974: 2–3) Indeed, Butcher states that in the 1890s, ‘the wealthiest individuals in the FMS had been Chinese, ... the evidence suggests that after 1900 more and more Chinese used their riches to acquire a style of living which was both more opulent and more westernized’ (Butcher, 1979: 83).


Philip Holden has shown how these ‘model colonists’ were treated with ambivalence by the British who alternated between high praise for and high criticism of these Celestials who were dangerously disrupting the colonial categories of Britishness and Chineseness. The ‘position of the Nanyang Chinese as model colonists, [destabilizes] Conrad’s national narrative through their too-successful imitation of Britishness, ... thus casting doubt upon a stable notion of British identity’ (Holden, 1994: 75). He also observes: Applying Bhabha’s terminology, we might say that the Nanyang Chinese make visible the split between pedagogic (the accumulated sense of British national identity) and the performative (the manner in which such identity is reinscribed, and rephrased in the colonies). Through their insistent imitation of the very qualities that, to British eyes at least, mark out Britishness as different, they dramatize the contradictions in the rhetoric of racial alterity which justifies British presence, forcing new reinscriptions of racial boundaries. (Holden, 1994: 70–1) The ‘national narrative’ Holden speaks of is an imperial one where imperial interests and supremacy needed to be secured, and which the slippery, transnational ‘first-class Chinaman’ Conrad’s ‘national narrative’ unnerves. As far as the Straits Chinese were concerned, their identification with the British and adoption of the language and culture were evidence of their entrance into Britishdom. For Krenn, the Chinaman in Conrad’s fiction displays a loyalty and friendship which surpasses that of the white man. Apart from ‘[daring] to differ from the crowd of Sambir inhabitants’, Jim-Eng’s loyalty to the British and to his patron, Lingard, is unwavering: As he was the only one who befriended the white man in the extremity of his disillusionment in Almayer’s Folly, so he is also alone in loyalty to the British flag and to Lingard when the Dutch one is hoisted in Sambir and Abdulla is established as the new trader of the settlement. (Krenn, 1990: 73) Unlike Captain Ford, who keeps his distance from the wasted Almayer, Jim-Eng stays on with the latter so that ‘[w]hatever one may think of Jim-Eng’s assistance to his neighbor, it is more than the white man, who remarks that an early death is the best remedy for Almayer, is ready to offer’ (31). In the same way, Wang remains on Samburan with his native

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wife after all the Europeans have departed leaving in their wake carnage and utter moral disintegration. It is Wang who, on Samburan, fulfils the role of enterprising Chinaman, displaying great enterprise and resourcefulness as he tends a vegetable garden. ‘He would make his master pay for the vegetables which he was raising to satisfy his instinct’ and he ‘[tidies] the place in this labour-saving way’ (181–2). As ‘the whole establishment’, he may justifiably play ‘Number Two’ to Baron Heyst’s ‘Number One’ (184). His union with a native Alfuro woman suggests the seeds of a peranakan society.7 He is portrayed as being exceptional, even in the curious way he had acquired his wife and impressed the Alfuros. The Alfuros, having been frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had blocked the path over the [central] ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept strictly on their side. The coolies, as a body, mistrusting the manifest mildness of these harmless fisher-folk, had kept to their lines, without attempting to cross the island. Wang was the brilliant exception. He must have been uncommonly fascinating, in a way that was not apparent to Heyst, or else uncommonly persuasive. (V 179) He is ‘used to white men’: he ‘savee [them] plenty’ (310–11). He had also clinched the Alfuro’s trust: ‘He has preached to the villagers. They respect him. He is the most remarkable man they have ever seen, and their kinsman by marriage. They understand his policy’ (347). Wang’s breach of the ‘national’ barricade, as it were, is symbolic of the Straits Chinaman’s disruption of national/racial categories. His interstitial, intermediary, inbetween position is suggested by his hut at the edge of the forest, distanced from both the main bungalows and the Alfuro village and yet straddling and coterminous with both worlds. Terry Collits has pointed out the similarities between Wang and Heyst and that ‘[w]hether or not Conrad intended the “victory” in the novel to be Wang’s, its narrative structure allows that possibility’ (Collits, 2005: 177–8). Collits argues that Wang’s victory lies in his ‘commitment to the traditional inhabitants of Samburan [which] suggests that Asian solidarity has outlasted the excesses of European adventure and romance’ (Collits, 2005: 178). Certainly his ‘relationship with his Alfuro wife appears far more solid than does poor Heyst’s with Lena’ (Collits, 2005: 180). Through all these observations, Collits makes the crucial point that ‘Wang’s “victory” is not that of the colonized over the colonizer, because Conrad does not construct the Malay Archipelago in those binary terms’ and that colonial terms like ‘mimicry’ and ‘hybridity’ will ‘have lost the pejorative associations’


(Collits, 2005: 180) conferred on them by colonialism. Wang’s mimicry and hybridity, like those of the Straits Chinese, have never been the potentially contentious cultural and national issues raised by those they ‘mimicked’; for John Chinaman, mimicry and hybridity had been integral to their survival and flourishing existence in the Malay world for centuries. In comparing Wang with Ariel in The Tempest, Robert Hampson notes that the Chinaman as a version of Ariel foregrounds the notion of invisible agency, of work that is done ‘magically’ – in other words, the mystification and occlusion of labour by class and imperial ideologies. At the same time, through the narrative, Wang also asserts his agency. Wang, in a noticeable reversal of colonial positions, ‘annexes’ both Heyst’s keys and his gun (V 180, 314). Wang similarly annexes the ground next to his hut and turns it over to cultivation (V 181). More significantly, Wang is disregarded by Jones and Ricardo, but is instrumental in their defeat: he shoots Pedro and shoves off their boat. Finally, when all the Europeans are dead, it is Wang and his Alfuro wife who remain in possession of the Diamond Bay settlement. (Hampson, 2000: 157) Hampson also points out that ‘if Conrad does not make much space for their voices, he at least makes visible the invisibility of servants and subject peoples’ (Hampson, 2000: 156). Take for example, Wang’s uncanny ability to appear and disappear; another example Hampson provides is Stein’s Javanese servant who ‘vanished in a mysterious way as though he had been a ghost only momentarily embodied for that particular service’ (LJ 204). Here, Hampson highlights the writer’s consistent treatment of the oriental servant class as visibly ‘invisible’ and contrasts it with the agency of the adaptable Chinese in Conrad’s East. I would add that Wang’s ‘annexing’ of keys, revolver, ground, and eventually wife, as well as the key role that he plays in routing the villains, is also reflective of the Chinese identification with and allegiance to their masters, their Number One. Seeing themselves as ‘partners’ in the imperial economic enterprise, and culturally as white as the new lords of the East, the Chinese ironically perform tasks which are generally attributed to Number One such as annexing and ‘preaching’. He does not hesitate to defy or stand up to Number One in the manner of an equal partner. Heyst explains to Nina that Wang had told [him] with horrible Chinese reasonableness that he could not let [them] pass the barrier, because [they] should be pursued. He doesn’t


like fights. He gave [Heyst] to understand that he would shoot [Heyst] with [his] own revolver without any sort of compunction, rather than risk a rude and distasteful contest with the strange barbarians for [his] sake. (V 347) In his desire to protect the ‘peaceable, kindly’ and ‘strange barbarians’ (V 347), he replicates the colonial project of ‘Protection’. Whether he was ‘a new emigrant probably’ (Y 212), paddling Captain Whalley to his ill-fated new command, or ‘a merchant with a big hong in Singapore’ (V 348), John Chinaman’s role in the colonial state would be gradually usurped by the colonial masters and the ‘Protectors’ of the Chinese. Conrad’s portrayal of the marginal Chinaman is a manifestation of ‘surplus’ even as history’s ‘surplus’ sheds important light on the Jim-Engs of the Malay world. In Conrad’s fictional Chinaman, fiction and history’s dialogue presents a larger picture of the Chinaman’s role in the state as well as the decline of that role. This dialogue casts ironic light on the opium-funded state which is ambivalent towards the Chinaman’s identification with Britishness. The same Chinaman was associated with opium-taking, an addiction which was eventually seen as culturally ‘contagious’ and morally depraved. The Chinese ‘sampan man’ in ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ seems to epitomize not only perceived exemplary Chinese tenacity but also his gradual and systematic invisibility in the eyes of the state: [The Chinaman’s] grievance was that the white man whom he had brought on shore from the gunboat had not paid him his boat-fare. He had pursued him so far, asking for it all the way. But the white man had taken no notice whatever of his just claim. (TLS 224)

‘Restless, like all his people’ (OI 111): the politics of Straits Arab identity in the colonial state In The Shadow-Line, the narrator had recently chucked his berth from a steamer. His bewilderment at his sudden decision has to do with the irrationality of leaving near-ideal job conditions, one of which concerns the ship’s owner, an ‘[e]xcellent (and picturesque) Arab’ (TSL 6): an Arab owned her, and a Syed at that. Hence the green border on the flag. He was the head of a great House of Straits Arabs, but as loyal a subject of the complex British Empire as you could find east of the Suez Canal. World politics did not trouble him at all, but he


had a great occult power amongst his own people. ... I myself saw him but once, quite accidentally on a wharf – an old, dark little man blind in one eye, in a snowy robe and yellow slippers. He was having his hand severely kissed by a crowd of Malay pilgrims to whom he had done some favour, in the way of food and money. His almsgiving, I have heard, was most extensive, covering almost the whole Archipelago. For isn’t it said that ‘The charitable man is the friend of Allah?’ (TSL 5–6) In the wider context of Malay world history, the passage points us to the Hadhrami diaspora8 in the region especially in the nineteenth century when abundant economic opportunities arising out of colonial expansion attracted many Arabs from across the Indian Ocean. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826), despite his deep prejudice against Arabs, allocated an Arab quarter for the community in his ‘divide and rule’ urban policy. The Arabs from the Hadhramaut region in Yemen did not arrive as unskilled workers but as traders, mercenaries, scholars, and missionaries. Some went on to become statesmen, leaders, and rajahs of their host societies, founding new sultanates like those of Perlis in the peninsula, Siak in Sumatra, and Pontianak in West Borneo. Their involvement in other kerajaans was also extensive. In many cases, these voluntary migrants combined commerce and religion because trading and proselytization were not regarded as mutually exclusive occupations. The Islamization of the Malay world from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards was not only the result of the influence of Indian Muslim traders but also that of the Hadhrami (although this task would soon pass into the hands of local hajis). Indeed, the ‘picturesque’ Arab above and Syed Abdulla bin Syed Selim in the Lingard stories combine trade and religious practice. Syed Abdulla’s ‘first commercial expedition’ (OI 109) aged 17, was to convey a crowd of pious Malays to Mecca for the haj. Syed Abdulla is British, as Lingard so vehemently declared, which means he was probably born in Penang where his ‘splendid house’ (OI 111) stood. Like the Straits Chinese, the Arabs born and domiciled in the colonies (by Conrad’s visit, Singapore Arabs were two or more generations removed from their Hadhramaut-born forefathers) played an important role in the colonial state. Their economic contribution may not have equalled that of the great farming syndicates of the Chinese but the main Arab families like the Alkaffs, the Alsagoffs, and the Aljunieds, were incredibly rich philanthropists and were involved in shipping, real estate, moneylending, agriculture (tea, pepper, gambier), and so on.


They also controlled much of the country trade. It was as a steamer trading in local products that the S.S. Vidar with Conrad on board as chief mate, was calling at Borneo and the Celebes. It belonged to ‘a Syed at that’: Syed Mohsin bin Salleh Al Joffree,9 a renowned and respected merchant of Singapore who also owned the trading posts at Bulungan and Berau. The high regard and reverence that some Arabs inspired was also because of the title ‘Syed’ before their names. A ‘Syed’ was a male claiming descent from the Prophet and he thus commanded great respect among the local Muslims, who saw Syeds as figures of religious knowledge and authority, piety and even ‘occult power’. The Straits Arabs (that is Straits-born) displayed great adaptability to their new surroundings: what William Clarence-Smith described as ‘the remarkable Hadhrami ability to blend in with host societies, while still retaining a distinct identity. Another was the close intertwining of religious, political, and commercial activity, which gave an added resilience to Hadhrami networks’ (Clarence-Smith, 1997: 18). The Straits Arab community did not identify themselves with either Malayness or Britishness. Nevertheless, their leadership status within the Malayo-Muslim community was second to none. Syed Farid Alatas observes that it was Arab contact with other Muslim groups in the Straits which had strengthened the sense of a separate Hadhrami identity. Their assimilation and marriages into host societies did not affect their cultural identity because ‘such identity was neither national nor ethnic, but was based on kinship’ (Alatas, 1997: 29). Arab immigrants and their descendants were not averse to intermarrying with the local non-Arab women (even non-Muslims) as they rarely brought their wives along with them or had brides sent out from home. Significantly, Syed Reshid, Abdulla’s nephew, had sought Nina’s hand. Aïssa, is the offspring of the blind Arab, Omar el Badavi, and a Baghadi Malay woman, prompting Willems to revile her as ‘a damned mongrel, half-Arab, half-Malay’ (OI 271). Nevertheless, despite social integration via mixed marriages, the Hadhrami Arabs and the mixed-blood Hadhramis in turn, tended to intermarry among themselves. In the same way, for as many that professed loyalty to the colonial empire, there were probably as many who did not. Much has been said about their political role in the high noon of empire so that the narratorial comment, ‘World politics did not trouble him at all’, is questionable: Hadhramis were highly active in the sphere of international politics, sometimes bolstering colonial rule by serving in European and Muslim empires. At other times, they hastened imperial demise,


notably by playing a prominent role in the emergence of modern Muslim political organisations. (Clarence-Smith, 1997: 10) There is no doubt that Arab politico-religious identity raised some concerns and issues for the colonial state. Conrad’s portrayal of Arabs in the Malay world mirrors some of these issues. Consider Lingard’s consternation on discovering that the nominally British Syed Abdulla had defected to the Dutch side in the tussle for Sambir: ‘But, hang it all! ... Abdulla is British’ (OI 179)! While Abdulla’s motives in leading Babalatchi’s conspiracy to destroy Almayer are clearly inspired by the ‘fierce trade competition’ (AF 24) between Lingard and himself, religion, politics, and commerce are seldom compartmentalized. It is Lingard’s ‘political and commercial successes’ (OI 111) which Abdulla envies. The story of the Arabs’ exclusion or inclusion in the colonial framework is predicated on their economic strength, their prestige among the local Malayo-Muslims and their unique ability to integrate commerce, politics, and religion. In Conrad’s fiction, similar ‘facts’ hold sway. In the colonial era, Europeans generally viewed Arabs with suspicion and distrust, regarding them as wily, ruthless, and piratical. The oppressive ‘quarter and pass’ system relentlessly enforced on the Arabs in the NEI for instance, reflects Dutch patronizing and prejudicial attitudes. The quarter system confined Arab residences to reserved enclaves and the pass system made passes compulsory for land and sea travel, thus severely restricting the mobility of Arab traders especially. Across the Straits, the British were also not above racial bigotry, although they left the Arabs alone for the most part and did not impose onerous regulations on them. Raffles despised the Arabs because he resented their hold over the Malays and their ‘presumption’ to act as spokesperson for their indigenous fellow believers. Mohammad Redzuan Othman writes that ‘[Raffles’s] detestation of the Arabs stemmed from their religious and administrative influence on Malays’ (Othman, 1997: 85). The following statement from Raffles is shocking in its unbridled contempt: [Arabs] worm themselves into the favour of the Malay chiefs, and often procure the highest offices in the Malay states. They hold like robbers the offices they obtain as sycophants, and cover all with the sanctimonious veil of religious hypocrisy. Under the pretext of instructing the Malays in the principles of the Mohammedan religion, they inculcate the most intolerant bigotry and render them incapable of receiving any species of useful knowledge. (quoted in Othman, 1997: 85)


Both in history and in Conrad’s tales, Arab involvement in local political intrigues and assumptions of Arab enterprise and shrewdness are evident. In the Lingard trilogy, the tendency to seek the Syed’s blessed counsel and succour is illustrated perfectly in Outcast of the Islands where Babalatchi and Lakamba appeal for Syed Abdulla’s intervention in the horrid matter of Almayer. At the council, the verbose and obsequious Babalatchi showers Syed Abdulla with tellingly deferential sobriquets: ‘First among the Believers, Giver of alms, Uplifter of our hearts, Protector of the oppressed, Dispenser of Allah’s gifts’ (OI 73–8). As if to illustrate Raffles’s bitter statement on Arab meddling in Malay affairs, Abdulla and his ‘great family lay like a network over the islands. They lent money to princes, influenced the council-rooms, faced – if need be – with peaceful intrepidity the white rulers who held the land and the sea under the edge of sharp swords’ (OI 110). The mysterious deluge of letters exchanged between the Arab and the rest of the Malay world almost certainly implies Arab patronage and benefaction in trade, in the Faith and in politics: In every port there were rich and influential men eager to see him, there was business to talk over, there were important letters to read: an immense correspondence, enclosed in silk envelopes – a correspondence which had nothing to do with the infidels of colonial post-offices, but came into his hands by devious, yet safe, ways. It was left for him by taciturn nakhodas of native trading craft, or was delivered with profound salaams by travel-stained and weary men who would withdraw from his presence calling upon Allah to bless the generous giver of splendid rewards. And the news was always good, and all his attempts always succeeded, and in his ears there rang always a chorus of admiration, of gratitude, of humble entreaties. (OI 111; emphasis added) The precise nature of this ‘immense correspondence’ can be inferred from pointed clues like ‘silk envelopes’. An epistolary thread links the Malayo-Muslim community with the Arabian élite not unlike ‘the many threads of a business that was spread over all the Archipelago’ (OI 109). The ‘immense correspondence’ is also a condensed metonymic figure for imperialism itself where one can only too easily imagine the volumes of letters, dossiers, files, and reports conveyed between the colonies and the Colonial Office in London over the course of colonial history itself. The ‘empire’ that the Arab élite subscribes to may not be as tangible as that of the European but it is arguably, an invisible empire based not just on trade but also on faith, a pan-Islamic empire


of Believers. Indeed, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, devout and learned Arabs dominated the Malay courts as religious leaders and administrators and were appointed to exalted positions: for instance the mufti, the sheikh al-ulama, or the paramount sheikh alIslam. Some were even conferred royal titles like tengku and yam tuan muda or were given important offices within the kerajaan like penghulu, orang kaya besar,10 and Bendahara. Religious authority was identified with political authority and those in political power were also economically powerful. Historically, prominent Arabs did engage in political intrigues, some plotting to resist British intervention while others actually collaborated with the infidel regime. In 1892, a group of agitators, including Arab sada (sing. syed/sayyid), seeking to remove the British from the peninsular Malay States, had declared an alternative sovereign to the British Queen, namely the Turkish Sultan, and an alternative empire, namely the Muslim Ottoman Empire.11 This matter was duly reported to the Colonial Office, adding to its ‘immense correspondence’. Apart from having links with important parties throughout the archipelago, Abdulla has an extended family spread out like a web in the region: ‘An uncle here – a brother there; a father-in-law in Batavia, another in Palembang; husbands of numerous sisters; cousins innumerable scattered north, south, east, and west – in every place where there was trade: the great family lay like a network over the islands’ (OI 110). Hampson has commented on Abdulla’s rhizomatic networks which reflect a ‘model of flexibility that chimes with a fluid performance of identity’ (Hampson, 2000: 109). He illustrates this point by referring to the flag-hoisting episode in An Outcast of the Islands where Abdulla’s agent, Willems, runs up the Dutch flag: As evidence of his flexibility, Abdulla, who is a British subject, operates expediently under a Dutch flag. As if to emphasise this point, he is contrasted with the Straits Chinese Jim-Eng, similarly a British subject, who almost loses his life for asserting ‘he was an Englishman, and would not take off his hat to any flag but English’ (OI 182). If the flags are signs of difference, the differences are not fixed and permanent but rather again part of a fluid performance of identity within the shifting pattern of political allegiances of the archipelago. (Hampson, 2000: 111) I might add that the difference between the two British subjects, JimEng and Abdulla, lies in the fact that the former has fluidly acculturated

126


himself into a British identity (Jim-Eng’s sense of self is ‘white’) whereas Abdulla is first and foremost, Arab. The Arabs resisted Europeanization and maintained their cultural identity because ‘such identity was neither national nor ethnic, but was based on kinship’ (Alatas, 1997: 29). How Conrad treated Arabs in his fiction may be affected by his Malay bias and his own doubts about the civilizing work in the colonies. He obviously saw Arabs as serious competitors in the trading arena and thus a potential source of unease for the British administration. In his fiction, characters’ feelings for Arabs vacillate between sheer exasperation and sheer admiration. That Abdulla was coveting not only Lingard’s commercial successes but also his political successes is also significant. Babalatchi reports that Lingard had ‘[taken] possession of Patalolo’s mind’ (OI 115), an alliance which does not augur well for Arab-Malay interests. The Arab élite’s paternalistic attitude in regarding themselves as natural-born leaders of the Malayo-Muslims and their privileged status as bearers of a superior Islamic civilization are comparable to the European’s civilizing mission in the colonies. However, the Arabs were seen to be ingratiating themselves with the Malay ruling classes. They ‘worm themselves into the favour of the Malay chiefs’ as Raffles had put it, and were not concerned about bettering the lives of the Malays. For the British, the Arab’s own ‘protection’ of the Malays must come across as an affront and a case of insolent presumptuousness. Lingard dismisses Abdulla to Willems: ‘His civility or his impudence are all one to me’ (OI 45). The subtext of the passage discloses colonial assumptions of the Arab: ‘Here, Willems’, he said, calling him to his side, ‘d’ye see that barque here? That’s an Arab vessel. White men have mostly given up the game, but this fellow drops in my wake often, and lives in hopes of cutting me out in that settlement. Not while I live, I trust. You see, Willems, I brought prosperity to that place. I composed their quarrels, and saw them grow under my eyes. There’s peace and happiness there. I am more master there than his Dutch Excellency down in Batavia ever will be when some day a lazy man-of-war blunders at last against the river. I mean to keep the Arabs out of it, with their lies and their intrigues. I shall keep the venomous breed out, if it costs me my fortune’. (OI 44–5) Arab influence within the local establishment and Arab competition for the trust and concession of the Malays were historical realities. Certainly, the intrigues and sedition fomented with much-venerated Arab assistance


were the stuff of novels.12 Implicitly, the Europeans have found their match in the shrewd and sophisticated Arabs, as the fiction ironically implies. As far back as the eighteenth century, Francis Light proclaimed them ‘good friends and dangerous enemies’ (quoted in Clodd, 1948: 56). The ‘incongruously paternal’ (OI 251) Lingard could only commiserate with the Malays who have resorted to Arab leadership: ‘Great pity. They will suffer for it. He will squeeze them’ (OI 173). However Lingard may rant and rave against the Arabs, his own enterprise is not entirely selfless and without blemish; he remains ‘incongruously paternal’. At the end of Almayer’s Folly, with the ‘respectful throng’ making a path for him, Abdulla makes his way to his old enemy’s corpse. Even as the crowd choruses ‘May you live!’ there is sense of futility in victory, a sense that the white man’s defeat is also the Arab’s defeat, a sense of mortality even among ‘superior’, ‘civilized’ beings. Death is the ultimate check on the battle of empires: Abdulla looked down sadly at this Infidel he had fought so long and had bested so many times. Such was the reward of the Faithful. Yet in the Arab’s old heart there was a feeling of regret for that thing gone out of his life. He was leaving fast behind him friendships, and enmities, successes, and disappointments – all that makes up a life; and before him was only the end. Prayer would fill up the remainder of the days allotted to the True Believer! (AF 208) In Conrad, piracy seems linked with Arabs. If there is any concept in Conrad’s texts that exposes the slippage between the signifier and its signified, it is piracy. The Arabic honorific ‘Sharif’ like ‘Syed’, denoted a male kinsman of the Prophet, and in the history of the Malay world, oddly or not, many a ‘pirate’ chief was a sharif (rendered variously as ‘Serip’, ‘Serib’, ‘Sareib’, ‘Sirib’, ‘Sarib’, and so on), for instance, Serip Sahap and Serip Mular, leaders of the Sekrang Dayak sea-robbers who resisted Brooke’s offensives. In Conrad, this group of sharif pirate-chiefs is represented by Sherif Ali, ‘an Arab half-breed, who, [Marlow believes], on purely religious grounds, had incited the tribes in the interior ... to rise, and had established himself in a fortified camp’ (LJ 257). In The Rescue, the Koran-toting Sheriff Daman ‘looks like an Arab’ (TR 175) and is the leader of the Illanun pirates. The pious Arab, Omar el Badavi in Outcast of the Islands, was also a pirate and the leader of the Brunei rovers. The combination of piracy and religion was not as incongruous as it seemed. Nicholas Tarling notes that the term ‘piracy’ like ‘state’, ‘administration’, or ‘aristocracy’, were European terms ‘the fitting of which to the Asian situation was in itself a piece of Europeanisation. ... Robbery and violence


indeed existed: but to describe them as piracy attributed them to lesser motives than, in the light of history, may often be fairly suggested for them’ (Tarling, 1978: 1). Tarling offers an alternative explanation of the concept of piracy in the Malay world, linking it to the process of indigenous state building and its peculiarities in precolonial times. At the time, the power wielded by political units, small or large, was fragile and constantly faced challenges from superior powers. Commercial empires that flourished on the entrepôt and the stapling of trade, were unstable because the area was undeveloped and coherence was difficult to maintain as a result of the fluidity of boundaries, the demographic immaturity due to migrations, the topography of the landscape, and the flexibility of relations between the littoral and the hinterland. Political change, whether it took the form of a succession dispute, revolution, or the wish to set up a new state, required wealth, or belanja, and one way of acquiring it was by marauding and slave-raiding. Marauding (which often includes making slaves of the victims) meant robbing other ports of their commerce and forcing traders to ply the ports of the marauding group. Thus is the group’s coffers and labour force increased, which automatically means an increase in dominance. The success of the marauding groups in revolution or state-building might make them part of the state-system: they might take a more regular role in the commerce and politics of the Peninsula and Archipelago, shifting easily from marauding to monopolising, ... If this has been called piracy, it was also an aspect of the political dynamics of this part of the world and, as such, its moral overtones are rather different: political motives enter into it. (Tarling, 1978: 4) The West, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, did much irrevocable damage to these ‘political dynamics’, and the resultant displacement and dispossession turned piracy into an end in itself rather than a means to an end. The role of Arab sharif adventurers comes into play here: One result of the loss of commerce and revenue was a shift to marauding on a more general scale than before: it became a way in which the Malay imperial aristocracy, deprived of other resources, could live from day to day. It became endemic, not epidemic. It was true that through it one might still effect a political purpose: an adventurer, especially a Sharif, with the credit of Islam and of its association with opposition to the Europeans, might thus acquire the power to effect a


revolution or an entry into the ‘establishment’. Even so, it was rarely as possible as before to shift back ... revolution became, as it were, permanent, rather than a means to an end, and marauding went on. The old empires decayed, but were not replaced, and within their boundaries marauding communities appeared, led by adventurous Sharifs, or deprived aristocracies, or hungry chiefs. The invasion of the Europeans did not destroy the native states, but it destroyed the dynamic of the state-system: it reduced the old capitals from splendour to poverty and their chiefs from heroism to ambivalence, from constructiveness to stagnation. (Tarling, 1978: 8, emphasis added) The fact that adventurous sharifs were able to inspire and command whole communities of marauders by virtue of their religious affiliations and anti-Infidel stance, says a lot about their aura and status in the eyes of Believers. Sheriff Daman ‘can wind the two Illanun pangerans round his little finger’ (TR 175). Nevertheless, despite the ‘occult power’ of the Arab sharifs, their ‘wanton’ ways were eventually quashed by the white rajah authority. Jim’s attack on Sherif Ali’s fortified camp was a resounding success and the English rajah who ruled in Kuching had trounced the Sekrang and Saribas pirates. It is important to note that in suppressing piracy, it is not just the rapine and plunder or the ‘throat-cutting, kidnapping, slave-dealing, and fire-raising’ (OI 52) per se that were targeted. Symbolically, the elimination of piracy is also the elimination of the ‘political purpose’ that piracy used to serve in the precolonial Malay state-system. By ousting the pirate sharifs, the colonial power makes a gestural pre-emptive strike against the Arabic political challenge and Arab-led or inspired ‘various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago’ (TU 3). The days of piracy may be over but as the nostalgic pirate Babalatchi prophesies: ‘There will be fighting. There is a breath of war on the islands. Shall I live long enough to see’ (AF 206)? The charismatic sharifs and syeds might yet ‘acquire the power to effect a revolution’ (Tarling, 1978: 8), although Conrad himself did not live long enough to see. Historically, a number of Arabs (and their descendants and students) did go on to involve themselves in emerging Muslim nationalist movements, wreaking some havoc for the colonizers. On the intellectual front, the Arabic contribution to the rising native intelligentsia is indisputable. As religious teachers and as important sponsors of the mission presses and vernacular journalism, Arabs ‘fostered a new Muslim culture and the birth of Malay journalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although Malay journalism began in the hands of Jawi Peranakan (locally born Indian Muslims) in Singapore,


Arab funding and intellectual leadership soon grew to be important’ (Mandal, 1997: 190–1). Pirates or otherwise, as we have seen, Conrad never idealized or outrightly condemned any particular group in his fictional world. The things he does condemn are, more often than not, common human greed, criminality, hypocrisy and moral self-righteousness. Both history and fiction contribute to the making of Conrad’s Arab but Conrad’s fiction affords us a glimpse into the uncertainties and insecurities of the colonial masters in the face of the formidable Arab influence among the Malays.

‘Here comes the Nazarene’ (LJ 284): the politics of racial frontiers and Conrad’s treatment of the European half-caste (Serani) métissage (interracial unions) emerges as a powerful trope for internal contamination and challenge conceived morally, politically, and sexually. ... métissage might be read as a metonym for the biopolitics of the empire at large. (Stoler, 2000: 325) The Eurasians were to become the truly dispossessed people of colonialism, an invisible group that was relegated to the periphery of society. (Beekman, 1992: 39) One morning in Patusan, Tamb’ Itam, Lord Jim’s ‘faithful and grim retainer’ pointed at Cornelius and said: ‘Here comes the Nazarene’. Marlow, who was there, states: ‘I don’t think he was addressing me, though I stood at his side; his object seemed rather to awaken the indignant attention of the universe’ (LJ 284–5). Cornelius or Inchi’ Nelyus as he is called by the Malays ‘with a grimace that meant many things’ (LJ 289) is a revolting character, invariably repulsive to all who come in contact with him, both white and brown. He is someone who might more appropriately fit Lingard’s condemnation of Willems: ‘You are neither white nor brown. You have no colour as you have no heart’ (OI 276). Cornelius is the Nazarene which means Eurasian or ‘native Christian’. The Malay term ‘Serani’ (rendered ‘Sirani’ by Conrad) to denote a person of mixed European and Asian origins, is the plural form of ‘Nasrani’, itself a word derived from ‘Nazarene’. R.J. Wilkinson’s Malay-English dictionary defines ‘Nasrani’ as ‘any Christian but commonly Portuguese Christian and generally Catholics’. The Serani had become synonymous with Catholicism so that to adopt a Eurasian identity was to become a


Catholic. However, in popular usage, ‘Nasrani’ refers more specifically to a Eurasian rather than ‘any Christian’. This apparent confusion in definitions is unsurprising, given the fact that colonial classification of Eurasians had been notoriously equivocal at best, devoid of any fixed principle. The mixed terminology constructed by both the state and the church to describe this community includes: ‘native Christians’, ‘those equated to Europeans’, ‘Portuguese’, ‘Indo-Britons’, ‘Indo-Portuguese’, ‘Europeans’, ‘Malacca native Christians’, ‘Dutch/Ceylon burghers’, ‘Anglo-Indians’, and so on. The ambiguity with which the Serani was racialized and categorized is symptomatic of the effects of being ‘inbetween’ and marginal, neither fully white nor brown. In a black and white world of Manichean differences, the Eurasian was the hopelessly grey area: a racial and national conundrum for the law-makers and government of the day to grapple with. Generally, Eurasians were legally recognized by the Dutch government as being ‘Europeans’ (or European equivalents) and were counted as Europeans in the censuses while probably all of the ‘Portuguese’ counted in the Malayan censuses were Eurasians from Malacca. Incidentally, in 1900, nearly three quarters of ‘Europeans’ in the NEI were either mestizo or Indies-born Europeans. Cornelius is a ‘Malacca Portuguese’ (LJ 220) which is technically, a Eurasian. In ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, Freya’s maid is a ‘half-caste Malacca Portuguese’ (TLS 177). If ‘Portuguese’ really meant Eurasian, it comes as no surprise that the prejudiced Englishman from Dorsetshire, Morrison, should doubt the literal ‘whiteness’ of the Portuguese in Timor and welcome the sight of Heyst: ‘he had stumbled on a white man, figuratively and actually white – for Morrison refused to accept the racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials’ (V 13). Nevertheless, mestizos in the Dutch ‘sphere’ were counted as ‘Europeans’. Consider Cornelius’s claim that he was an Englishman (that is, a British subject) from Malacca (a crown colony). It was only in 1849 that the term ‘Eurasian’ was introduced in the census reports of the Straits Settlements. In the Dutch territories though, Eurasians remained nominally ‘Europeans’. It is interesting to note that the Malays address Cornelius as ‘Inchi’ (Mr) and not ‘Tuan’ which is reserved for whites. This implies that in spite of Cornelius’s classification under ‘European’ in Dutch registers and his European name, local prejudice for the half-caste overrides the official line. The Eurasian stories as framed within the fiction are inevitably those of liminal identities and fissured selves stigmatized by their ‘halfness’, or mixed extraction, and the resultant connotations of racial adulteration and hybridity. There are some very prominent Seranis in Conrad


and in so far as their bodies are encoded with the colonial state’s anxiety and ambivalence when it comes to the métis question,13 they warrant investigation. Conrad’s own ambivalent attitude towards the half-caste is coloured by the unstable discursive fields generated by this question (the British experience reveals similarly discordant discourses as that of the Dutch). At stake were issues like nationality, racial membership, cultural aptitude, bourgeois morality, patriotism, the domestic versus the state, and the private sphere versus the public. Conrad’s fiction exposes the fault lines and loopholes in the state’s construction of the Eurasian and in that sense constitutes a critique of the colonial ‘facts’ created around the Eurasian identity. In the binary discourse of ‘wholeness’ (‘I am white! All white!’ [OI 271] howls Willems) and ‘halfness’, ‘purity’, and ‘pollution’, the mixed-blood occupies an interstitial position, a no-man’s land of dubious identity. In relation to the colonial state, they did not just embrace Europeanness as some of the Straits Chinese had done; some could lay claim to it as a birthright. Just as ‘can anything good come from Nazareth?’ was said of the Nazarene Jew, so too ‘can anything good come from the Nazarenes of the Malay world?’ was the prevailing prejudice of the time. The Indo blood that mingled with the white was deemed to be corrupting. Ann L. Stoler writes that the mixing of white and brown was ‘[c]onceived as a dangerous source of subversion’ and ‘seen as a threat to white prestige’. It was ‘an embodiment of European degeneration and moral decay’ (Stoler, 2000: 325). Although the so-called Ethical and liberal policies that were propounded in colonial Southeast Asia at the end of the nineteenth century would reject essentialist theories of racial hierarchy, they ‘[confirmed] the practical predicates of European superiority’ (Stoler, 2000: 325). In the Straits Settlements, the progeny of miscegenation (or their descendants) was blatantly discriminated against in areas like government employment where the colour bar disqualified candidates who were not ‘of pure European descent on both sides’ but were trying for senior and high positions. Butcher quotes an editorial in the Malay Mail in 1913 which said that Eurasians ‘seldom possessed those robust, rugged, manly attributes which have helped the Anglo-Saxon race to go forth and found the greatest Empire the world has ever seen’ (quoted in Butcher, 1979: 107). Although a Eurasian might be an Englisheducated graduate and be well-equipped skill-wise to do the job, he was deemed ill-equipped in the sense of cultural competence. The Eurasian was seen as lacking the masculine virility of the dominant race. In the late nineteenth century, Western enterprise was basically a boys’ club favouring late-Victorian manly virtues of athleticism, stamina, team


spirit, self-reliance, and patriotism. R. Hyam writes: ‘The qualities most unsparingly disparaged by the late-Victorians were sentimentalism and lack of sexual control. They had a horror of sex for the unmarried. The late nineteenth-century cult of manliness became a powerful and pervasive middle-class moral code’ (Hyam, 1990: 72). The transgression of this code via sexual excesses and indulgence in concubinage was rampant nevertheless. It was reported that 90 percent of Europeans in Malayan outstations had native mistresses (plantation concubines) in the 1890s. In the NEI, it was this immoral state of affairs which, inter alia, pressed the need for tighter control and legislation over concubinary relations (which had created a host of social problems) as well as the formalization of mixed-marriage laws and laws pertaining to the mestizo. Since Mrs Almayer uses her husband’s ‘Blanda law’ as her legal trump card and Jewel’s father was Dutch, we need only concern ourselves with the Dutch colonial racial policy. The Da Souza siblings themselves are the Dutchman Hudig’s abandoned bastard children. In her detailed analysis of colonial French and Dutch mestizo identities and policies, Stoler notes that abandonment (not so much physical but cultural neglect) and pauperism were the two main spectres of métissage and that ‘[t]he consequences of mixed unions were ... collapsed into a singular moral trajectory, which, without state intervention, would lead to a future generation of Eurasian paupers and prostitutes, an affront to European prestige and a contribution to national decay’ (Stoler, 2000: 329). Nina Almayer is perhaps Conrad’s most famous Eurasian. Unlike the ugly Joanna da Souza, she is a ravishing beauty. Nina who is an ‘Anak Putih’ (OI 194, ‘white child’) in both European and Malay eyes, is taught to think herself white, and is mostly alluded to as ‘Mem Putih’ (AF 31) or ‘half white’, stressing the European ancestry. However, as we have seen earlier, contrary to her racial conditioning by her father and her European teachers, she opts to become Malay. This highlights the performative aspect of identity expressed by a simple rejection of ‘the white side of her descent’ (AF 43) as opposed to the pedagogic: ‘ “I taught her. I taught her”, [Almayer] repeated’ (OI 194). Her education in Singapore under the guardianship of Mrs Vinck and her father’s great pains to ensure that she grows up white and civilized are tied up with Almayer’s dream of returning to the fatherland and his own status within the Dutch colonial state. As a European born in the Indies of a lower middle-class Dutch family, Almayer is also an Indo-European. Indeed, the term ‘Indo-European’, to complicate matters, did not just refer to Europeans of mixed parentage, but was also used for Europeans of Dutch nationality born in the


Indies. Almayer is Indo-European and as such, is differentiated from the European-born Dutch. However, unlike his Indies-born compatriots, Almayer does not quest for an Indies fatherland or the alleviation of poverty among the Indo-European poor (note the ‘meagre comforts of the parental bungalow’ [AF 5]), but instead, longs to return to the original fatherland, the Netherlands, and to return there a wealthy man. Brought up by a mother who ‘[bewails] the lost glories of Amsterdam’ (AF 5), Almayer dreams of a blissful life in Amsterdam and is a complete misfit in the colonies. Motherhood and the domestic milieu have at least proven effective in the raising of a would-be European, if not a patriot. In actual practice, Almayer is partial towards the British and his adoptive British father, Lingard, even though he may set his wistful sights on Amsterdam. He sneers at the Dutch officers: ‘What have you ever done to make me loyal’ (AF 138)? This taunt takes on added significance in the light of Almayer’s Indo-European status. European education, upbringing, and civilized surroundings (preferably Europe itself) were deemed instrumental in the inculcation of Europeanness and competence in Dutch culture. His reluctant marriage to Lingard’s adopted native daughter, ‘that legacy of a boatful of pirates’ and after Lingard’s injunction, ‘And don’t you kick because you’re white’ (AF 10)!, sets the stage for what D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke describes as ‘complications in Almayer’s “mixed” marriage and fortunes partly because Conrad has a sense of the equality among races and a balanced critical sense’ (Goonetilleke, 1977: 54). Nina embodies this ‘equality’ and ‘balance’ in the sense that her choices and actions are motivated by passion and a brave determination to respond to the promptings of her heart rather than by the exhortations of a racist white father or a savage vindictive mother. Krenn points out that Nina ‘has illusions neither about the Malays nor about the Europeans’ (Krenn, 1990: 19) and that When she expresses scorn for Reshid and all Arabs, calling them cowards, it is therefore more a manifestation of her passionate being than of racial prejudice. Likewise, the fierce hatred of white people which she voices to the Dutch officers is explained by an apprehension for her lover and by her own experiences in Singapore more than by an attitudinal preference for one color of the skin over the other. (Krenn, 1990: 19) On the verge of embarking on a new life with Dain Maroola, Nina ‘understood ... the reason and the aim of life; ... she threw away disdainfully her


past with its sad thoughts, its bitter feelings and its faint affections, now withered and dead in contact with her fierce passion’ (AF 152). Upon her homecoming from the colonial city of Singapore and back in the squalor of the native kampong, Nina finds no difficulty in discarding her ‘Christian teaching, social education’ for her native roots. The ‘narrow mantle of civilized morality, in which good-meaning people had wrapped her young soul’ (AF 42) had fallen away. Conrad tells us that ‘her teachers did not understand her nature, and the education ended in a scene of humiliation, in an outburst of contempt from white people for her mixed blood’ (AF 42). It is probable that the project to educate Nina would have worked if not for white jealousies and a deeply entrenched white racism. Mrs. Vinck’s ‘white nest’ (AF 42) had been grossly affronted by the fact that an eligible young banker had favoured Nina over her Europeaneducated ‘snow-white doves’ (AF 42), namely, her daughters. In any event, the girl, shuttled back and forth between white and brown milieux, ‘had lost the power to discriminate’ (AF 43) between ‘civilized morality’ (AF 42) and barbarism. In the long passages given to Nina’s internal reflection, we see Conrad’s veiled irony of Dutch ‘good-meaning’ attempts to define and bestow national identity for the multitudes of Eurasians in their domain. Arguably, the lengthy explanation for Nina’s ‘Malay’ state of mind, is also Conrad’s way of working out in his own mind how to construct, handle, and inscribe the half-caste identity, racially, culturally, legally, and politically. Nevertheless, as a cultural hybrid himself and with his own doubts about the flimsy veneers of civilization and culture, Conrad must have recognized the irony of such an attempt. In the meantime, Almayer has good reason to be ‘greatly alarmed by his wife’s influence upon the girl’ (AF 31). In a scenario where those legally European were defined by their mental distance from their native natures and by their no longer identifying with native ancestry, Nina was not in the best form for re-integration into Dutch society. The mother’s role in cultural and national upbringing (this time, in native ways) had displaced the patriarchal principle and the ‘domestic scenes by Almayer’s hearthstone’ (AF 38) are not just about the treasure in the wilderness, but are metonymic of the contradictions, loopholes, and fault lines informing colonial racial politics with regard to interracial unions. The family of a mixed couple was no longer necessarily ‘the crucial site in which future [European] subjects and loyal citizens were to be made’ (Stoler, 2000: 326) especially if husband and wife were in conflict on the matter. Christopher GoGwilt argues that ‘[t]here is a strong sense in which Nina’s romance with Dain Maroola involves a struggle to forge a national


identity and national loyalties stronger than those of her “traditionless father” (AF 43), an Indies-born and distinctly unpatriotic Dutchman’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 85). On a related note, Hampson reads Nina’s choice of savagery as a necessary ‘betrayal’: ‘Nina combines within herself two strands which the surrounding society polarises. In that polarised society, a conflict of loyalties is unavoidable – and “betrayal” is necessary – if she is to find an identity’ (Hampson, 1992: 17). He also argues later that ‘rather than privileging the end of the novel and reading it in terms of Nina’s finding her identity through choosing a particular originary identity, emphasis could be placed on Nina’s actual behaviour in the course of the narrative, which represents a continuous performance of identity through a constant negotiation of her own hybridity’ (Hampson, 2000: 107). He quotes Nina’s ambivalent behaviour and language switching to support this reading. Heliéna Krenn, on the other hand, does not see Nina’s cultural predicament as a form of ‘betrayal’ or of a ‘continuous performance of identity’ but rather as a quest and ‘hunger for life and the immediacy of her response to it’ (Krenn, 1990: 19). Driven mainly by a ‘passion [which] develops into a love that ready to give and to forego’ (Krenn, 1990: 20), Nina’s ‘resistance to demoralizing pity does not diminish her affection for her father, ... nor the ability to distinguish between the loyalties she owes’ (Krenn, 1990: 22). It is just that the dual loyalties, her Malay heritage and her ‘white side’, are engulfed by a higher loyalty, a visceral and moral attachment to her lover and by her dream of fulfilment: ‘By the truthfulness to herself in [following her dream], she contrasts most significantly with Almayer who betrayed himself in his marriage’ (Krenn, 1990: 22). In his discussion of the Pantai river as ‘a prototype for the Congo’ and ‘the atavistic influence it casts upon white men’, Daniel R. Schwarz argues that tropical Sambir and its primordial jungle ‘[embody] Conrad’s nightmare of various kinds of moral degeneracy and how it is for him a grim Dantesque vision of damnation’ (Schwarz, 2001: 124–5). In such a setting which threatens to ‘[move] toward chaos rather than toward order’, Conrad ‘proposes family and personal relationships as an alternative to the greed and hypocrisy that dominate Sambir life’ (Schwarz, 2001: 125). Certainly, Nina’s passionate pursuit of a personal relationship with her lover (albeit at the cost of one particular family tie) can be read as a quest for an alternative mode of existence which transcends the ‘the same manifestations of love and hate and of sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar’ (AF 43) which she has witnessed in both Sambir and Singapore.


At this juncture, I argue here that Nina’s rejection of the ‘white side of her descent represented by a feeble and traditionless father’ (AF 43) is also very simply part of Conrad’s richly ironic social experiment in light of all the usual assumptions and prejudices latched on to the figure of the halfcaste. He makes his half-caste opt for the tradition of her Malay kinsmen rather than languish under the ambiguous and marginalized ‘IndoEuropean’ label of her father. East Indies Indo-Europeans, not unlike the white creoles of the West Indies, are tainted with colour. Rather than be an Antoinette Mason, a white nigger, Nina reverts to savagery and though Clifford may protest vehemently that Eurasians wished only to be identified with Europeans,14 the decision to make her ‘wholly black’ rather than a slavish mimic of whiteness (a recognized characteristic of the ‘traditionless’) is one way of salvaging the dignity of a half-caste. However Conrad may have gone against colonial ‘facts’, there is that idea of a half-caste who would be whole rather than splintered, who desires to belong to a tradition rather than be ‘feeble and traditionless’ (AF 43) like her IndoEuropean father (and Eurasians in general, being in-between) and whose choice of Malayness ironically confirms the principle that you cannot make a half-caste white. There is the supplementary logic that white or brown made no difference anyway. As Nina contemplates: ‘It seemed to [her] that there was no change and no difference. Whether they traded in brick godowns or on the muddy river bank; whether they reached after much or little; ... Nina saw only the same manifestations of love and hate and of sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its multifarious and vanishing shapes’ (AF 43). Nevertheless, the aporia in the logic is evident in that a choice still had to be made as ‘in-between’ or ‘both’ were not options. Nina would be ‘Malay’ rather than liminal and devoid of a recognized and recognizable cultural identity. Furthermore, there is the implication that her ‘Malay’ side is an immutable and intrinsic aspect of her soul whereas the acquired or learnt European culture can only be an external and flimsy casing, a ‘narrow mantle’ that falls away easily to reveal the unchangeable and unchanging savage. You cannot make a half-caste white. The narrator informs us that ‘[her] soul, [lapses] again into the savage mood, which the genius of civilization working by the hand of Mrs. Vinck could never destroy’ (AF 67). Nevertheless, Nina’s reversion to primitivism is also a conscious and rational choice and not one based on essences. Nina’s witch-like mother had regaled her with stories of the ‘savage glories’, ‘barbarous fights, and savage feasting’ of her Malay kinsmen, which to Nina’s mind ‘seemed at last preferable to the sleek hypocrisy, to the polite disguises, to the virtuous pretences of such white people as she had had the misfortune to come in contact with’


(AF 42–3). Nina certainly had time enough on her hands to digest these stories, recall the past and freely weigh the situation and grapple with the issues. Interestingly, though, the text serves to reinforce the notion of racial/national essences and racial contamination seen from both European and Asian/native perspectives. Consider Ford’s insistence that ‘You can’t make her white’ (AF 31) even after ten years of cultural conditioning in Singapore or even Babalatchi’s view that Nina ‘being half white, is ungovernable’ (AF 129). Nina’s teachers did not understand her ‘nature’ (AF 42). In his discussion of the ‘cultural hybrids’ in Conrad’s fiction, John W. Griffith observes that ‘[i]n a typical Victorian formulation, the half-civilized person throws off the constraints of civilization. Conrad paints a picture of a person of “mixed race” which is similar to those of popular contemporary writers’ (Griffith, 1995: 141–2).15 Griffith also notes that Conrad’s Europeans share a similar predicament with the half-caste which is that the ‘veneer of civilization, ... . is very thin’ (Griffith, 1995: 142). As Captain Giles declares philosophically in The Shadow-Line: ‘Things out East were made easy for white men. That was all right. The difficulty was to go on keeping white’ (TSL 51). Clothing imagery conveys the idea of an enforced acculturation which is shallow and contrived at best so that the ‘narrow mantle of civilized morality’ (AF 42) falls off easily once a person is returned to a savage environment. This condition underscores the savage’s indestructible ‘savage mood’ (AF 67); however, Griffith’s argument emphasizes that for both the civilized and uncivilized, the external trappings of civilization are difficult to keep on. In Mrs Almayer’s case, her conjugal relation with a European meant that she shared her husband’s legal status. Throughout the two novels in which she is featured, she is known only as Mrs Almayer and nothing else. Her legally married status and identity as wife constitute her triumphant weapon against her cowed husband as she gloats over his misery: ‘ “You know, Kaspar, I am your wife! your own Christian wife after your own Blanda law!” For she knew that this was the bitterest thing of all; the greatest regret of that man’s life’ (AF 40). Stoler writes that while mixed marriages between Christian and non-Christian had been forbidden since the VOC had established the settlement of Batavia, the new Civil Code of 1848 replaced that religious criteria ‘with the ruling that marriage partners of European and native standing would both be subject to European law’ (Stoler, 2000: 338). This implies that Mrs. Almayer is legally ‘European’ herself, no longer subject to her native penal code (that is Adat) but subject to that of the Dutch. Being a Christian convert as well must stand her in good stead where the law was concerned. Her behaviour, which contravenes everything Christianity and Europeanness


connote, only intensifies the force of her spiteful gloating and flies in the face of her ‘European’ identity. Conrad’s foregrounding of the ‘Blanda law’ rings with irony. First, Mrs Almayer’s respectable, lawful and ‘civilized’ status as ‘Mrs.’ (as opposed to the illegal status of a concubine) belies her witch-like demeanour and animist disposition, which jointly constitute a travesty of the term ‘European’. Secondly, ‘Blanda law’ had failed to construct her ‘national’ identity or that of her ‘European’ daughter’s inasmuch as Mrs Almayer consistently condemns the white man/ Hollanders or ‘Orang Blanda’ (AF 42), the very people who had bestowed her with the privilege of being a ‘Mrs. Almayer’. Years ago, before the altar of the Christian God, Mrs Almayer had cynically resolved to fully exploit her privileges as the wife of a white man: ‘She, ... had retained enough of conventual teaching to understand well that according to white men’s law she was going to be Almayer’s companion and not his slave, and promised to herself to act accordingly’ (AF 23). In contrast to Mrs Almayer and Nina, the Da Souza tribe, which is an example of Indo-European poverty, exemplifies the social and moral problems commonly associated with Eurasians: illicit sexual relations between European men and native women and the tendency for the father to abandon and neglect his illegitimate offspring. Hudig’s abandoned, half-caste children languish in decrepit conditions as Da Souzas, ‘that shabby multitude; those degenerate descendants of Portuguese conquerors’ (OI 4). The ‘multitude’ here represented by the Da Souza tribe may well stand for all Eurasians. Indeed, in In Search of Conrad, Stephen de Souza tells the author Gavin Young: ‘Oh, Mr Young, you only have to throw a stone in Singapore and you are sure to hit a de Souza’ (Young, 1991: 87). After all, as far as Willems was concerned, all half-caste Europeans were ‘degenerate’, ‘a half-caste, lazy lot’ (OI 4). ‘Hudig had found an easy way to provide for the begging crowd. He had shifted the burden of his youthful vagaries on to the shoulders of his confidential clerk’ (OI 36). The ‘begging crowd’ was a real problem in the Dutch Indies. Abandoned children of European fathers risked exclusion from European society, especially if they remained in the native, maternal environment. The Da Souzas were perhaps spared the ignominy of exclusion since Willems was their ‘providence’ and the ‘white husband of the lucky sister’ (OI 3), Joanna. Certainly, the confrontation between Leonard da Souza and Willems is noteworthy for the way it unsettles European complacency: ‘Do not hurt [Joanna], Mr. Willems. You are a savage. Not at all like we, whites’. ... ‘Do not be brutal, Mr. Willems’, said Leonard, hurriedly.

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‘It is unbecoming between white men with all those natives looking on’. ... ‘Restrain your improper violence’, he went on mumbling rapidly. ‘I am a respectable man of very good family, while you ... it is regrettable ... they all say so ... ’ (OI 28–9) Philip Holden writes that the veneration showed Willems by the Da Souzas confirms Willems’s whiteness. ‘That family’s admiration was the great luxury of his life. It rounded and completed his existence in a perpetual assurance of unquestionable superiority’ (OI 3–4). However, this complacency is shattered after his dismissal from Hudig & Co. Leonard da Souza, the ‘dark-skinned brother-in-law’ (OI 3), now claims European identity and ‘[uses] the same rhetoric of Othering which the Dutchman had previously employed’ (Holden, 1994: 73). Subsequently, Willems’s European identity is shaken to the quick, his reinscription of racial differences undermined. Holden’s analysis is cogent, but one should also note the fact that Leonard is counted as European/white, at least legally speaking. Willems’s consternation and anger at his brotherin-law’s audacity and rebellion may spring from the fact that to the bigoted Willems, the Da Souzas do not know what it means to be European. They display only the stereotypical behaviour of natives: lazy, dirty, grovelling, demoralized, fatalistic. Their poverty and their dwellings on the outskirts of Makassar suggest a severance from the mainstream European community. Nevertheless, Leonard is ‘European’, although the policymakers may argue that he is only so outwardly, as shown by his attire: ‘pink neckties’ and ‘patent-leather boots’ (OI 3). Indeed he may be one of those belonging to ‘a new underclass of European paupers, of rootless children who could not be counted among the proper European citizenry, whose sartorial trappings merely masked their cultural incompetence’ (Stoler, 2000: 329). On a few crucial counts, however, Leonard fits the bill of a legal European: he is Christian, he is fluent in Dutch (obviously he and Willems spoke Dutch), and he seems to be well versed in what constituted European moral values if his diction is anything to go by: ‘respectable’, ‘very good family’, ‘restrain ... improper violence’, ‘unbecoming’. Once again, it is clear that racial and cultural differences and the markers that encoded these differences were often superficial and debatable. The Eurasian embodied the flaws, fallacies, and paradoxes of colonial prescriptions and criteria for citizenship as Conrad’s fictional Eurasians so forcefully dramatize. In the absence of a mestizo category as a legally distinct community, Serani were doomed to be ersatz Europeans rather than echte (true) Europeans unless they could satisfy the authorities that they fulfilled the ‘criteria’ for inclusion


into the ‘nation’. It would appear that the Nazarene is rejected by all, white and brown alike. Aïssa’s harsh words may well sum up the prejudice: ‘A Sirani woman. A woman of a people despised by all’ (OI 358). If Joanna had been white, Aïssa might have dealt better with the blow, but a Sirani woman ... The Eurasian was ‘European’ but at the same time, he was in permanent exile, included and yet disavowed, since his fatherland was indeterminable. The image of Joanna’s face which ‘in the halflight above the lamp, appeared like a soiled carving of old ivory – a carving, with accentuated anxious hollows, of old, very old ivory’ (OI 315) is strikingly apt in evoking the Eurasian predicament of ‘soiled’ or sullied whiteness. Conrad’s meditation on the mestizo problem also appears to reflect the sins of the father, where abandoned mistresses and children are left to mourn and suffer. Jewel’s Dutch father and her Dutch grandfather before that, had both left their women and children to fend for themselves. In his treatment of Jewel, who is technically a Eurasian herself, Conrad plays his favourite role of the ‘rescuer’, as I will show. In the tales, the half-caste generally falls into two categories. The first class is represented by the Government official residing some distance away from Patusan, the ‘big, fat, greasy, blinking fellow of mixed descent’ (LJ 278) and the likes of the pathetic, dangerous, and parasitic Cornelius who beetle-like, cadge from and exploit others without remorse. Then there are the Ninas and Jewels of the Eastern world where passionately romantic liaisons and acts of nobility and honour rule the day. The scene of Jewel’s supplication to Marlow is significant. It is there that an appeal for an assurance of Jim’s fidelity is made. Jewel’s experience is of European lovers and father swearing never to go and then breaking their promises: ‘Other men had sworn the same thing. ... My father did. ... [My mother’s] father, too’ (LJ 314). Confronted with this horror of white male irresponsibility and sexual excess, Marlow ‘had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder’ and reels from ‘the chaos of dark thoughts [he] had contemplated for a second or two beyond the pale’ (LJ 313). In portraying Jewel as an abandoned daughter of an interracial union (who, with her anguished Dutch-Malay mother was forced to live with the tyrannical Cornelius) and the vulnerable spouse of a white man who might also ‘arise and go’ (LJ 315), Conrad puts a human face on to the ‘statue’ and ‘apparition’ before Marlow. Touched by her entreaties, Marlow sees Jim and Jewel as ‘tragic’, both of them in a sense disowned by and estranged from their respective metropolitan societies. The ‘two benighted lives’ were ‘tragic to [Marlow’s] mind’. ‘And Jim, too – poor devil! Who would need him?

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Who would remember him? He had what he wanted. His very existence probably had been forgotten by this time. They had mastered their fates. They were tragic’ (LJ 316). One of the moving thematics in the love story of Jim and Jewel relates to their immense ‘mastery’ and transcendence of their fates. Conrad’s tragic hero and heroine, vindicated at last by their heroism (he, in bringing order to Patusan’s chaos and saving Jewel from Cornelius and she, in saving Jim’s very life) and reigning in their private raj, are symbolically ‘rescued’ from their social alienation and moral oppression. The social and moral converge with the ‘national’ in the politics of citizenship. Marlow’s attempts at ‘exorcism’ (LJ 316) or casting out Jewel’s and Jim’s ‘national’ demons as it were, is Conrad’s literary deliverance of the disgraced European and the neglected half-caste. Padmini Mongia argues that, seen from the perspective of Gothic feminism, Jim is not only the masculine hero of adventure and romance but, like his Jewel, also ‘as much the figure in white – virginal, helpless, in need of rescue by the master story-teller Marlow’ (Mongia, 1998: 156). Marlow’s ‘rescue work’ (NLL 13) entails rescuing Jim from disgrace and reinstating him as ‘one of us’ and ‘Marlow’s tale-telling is the primary form of this rescue’ (Mongia, 1998: 165). However, as Mongia points out, Jewel’s condition at the end of the novel remains that of an abandoned lover since Jim does indeed leave her forever. Jewel’s worst fears come true and she is doomed to repeat the fate of Eurasian women like her mother and grandmother: ‘Condemned, then, by Jim’s actions to repeat her mother’s history, Jewel takes her place in a generational drama which allows the colonized woman no role other than abandonment by the colonizing white man’ (Mongia, 1998: 163–4). Perhaps the only difference between Jewel and the other two women hinges on the word ‘marital’, which Marlow pointedly uses twice: first when he describes Jim’s tone in addressing Jewel and later again when he describes the locals’ superstitious theory about their ‘marital evening walks’ (LJ 282): ‘Jewel he called her; and he would say this as he might have said “Jane”, don’t you know – with a marital, homelike, peaceful effect. ... This was the theory of Jim’s marital evening walks’ (LJ 278, 282, emphasis added). If Jewel’s mother and grandmother are Eurasian concubines and illegitimate offspring (and the history of concubinage bears it out), Jewel and Jim are, at least by Marlow’s reckoning, wedded and recognized as living in conjugal bliss. In any case, however short-lived their Patusan paradise was, Jim chooses a heroic, honourable death and Jewel goes on to live with Stein like a debutante, marking her rightful, albeit delayed, entry into a


European milieu. Although you cannot make a half-caste white, it is only honourable for a fostering state to atone for the sexual excesses of its agents. Jim marries the girl, thus fulfilling his responsibilities not only to his new state but also to his Eurasian lover, the product of miscegenation and abandonment. Stein, who ‘adopts’ her at the end of the novel, was himself legally married to a native woman and the father of a Eurasian daughter: ‘The only woman that had ever existed for him was the Malay girl he called “My wife the princess”, or, more rarely in moments of expansion, “the mother of my Emma” ’ (219). The almost deliberate stress on ‘[m]y wife’ and ‘my Emma’ in this interracial union suggests a husband and father’s wilful sense of moral responsibility for his family. In another tale, the paternal Lingard cautions Willems (the irresponsible husband of Joanna and father of their son) with these words: ‘I appeal to what is best in you; do not abandon that woman’ (OI 39). Doing one’s moral duty was paramount. Lingard himself ‘had done his duty by the girl’ (AF 23) he had made an orphan many years ago, Mrs Almayer. The ‘Mrs’ assigns any native and half-caste woman the legal status of a European: the perfect atonement for the sins of the father. Thus Lingard marries his Sulu orphan off to Kaspar Almayer and Peter Willems complains bitterly about his wife, Hudig’s illegitimate Eurasian child: ‘She was nobody, and I made her Mrs. Willems. A halfcaste girl’ (OI 267)! As we have seen, the half-caste embodied the problem of miscegenation which was taken as a sexual breach of the colour bar: a condition which filled the colonialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with dread. In the fiction, the Malays themselves regard the Serani as unwholesome, despicable and queer: Ali heard the voice of his master talking. Talking to that Sirani woman! Who was she? ... She was a Sirani woman – and ugly. He made a disdainful grimace ... That Sirani woman shrieked! ... Was she dead in there? How interesting and funny! (OI 307–8) Like Conrad, Clifford portrayed Malay racism (directed not only to whites and Eurasians but also to the Chinese) perhaps as a strategic displacement of the white man’s own revulsion of interbreeding. In so far as the ‘noble’ and masculine Malays were seen as conditional ‘equals’ to the European, their view must necessarily mirror that of the white man. Philip Holden notes this in his assessment of Clifford’s short story, ‘The Wages of Sin’: ‘Liaisons between Chinese men and Malay women, in the narrator’s eyes, are naturally condemned by the Malay community, who

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are as incensed as would be “Europeans who saw their sisters mated with negroes” ’16 (Holden, 2000: 55). Nevertheless, it is a fact that before the major European settler colonies were formed, the first wave of Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, and other European expatriates to Asia (India, Ceylon, Burma, Siam, the Malay Archipelago, Indo-China, and so on) had produced progeny of mixed parentage, the original Eurasians, who, in their turn, had sired whole new generations of Eurasians via marriages with other Eurasians or with the other races. In this atmosphere of relatively flexible ethnic differentiation, intermarriage or racial mixing was commonplace. So when and why did all this change? Clammer offers a plausible explanation: ‘... it can be argued that the appearance of strict ethnic boundaries only appeared with the colonial era’ (Clammer, 1979: 4). As Hyam notes: Mid-eighteenth-century metropolitan attitudes towards non-Europeans were not as unfavourable as they were to become. ... The first signs of change appeared in India in the 1790s, when miscegenation became officially disapproved of, and the Anglo-Indian community was rejected as a possible ‘collaborating class’. ... Disillusionment with non-Europeans accumulated as actual experience grew of trying to govern and convert them. This was a key factor in the hardening of racial attitudes. So too was the galvanic effect of the Industrial Revolution, intensifying the British sense of mastery and superiority, and leading to a devaluation of those societies previously admired for a stability that now seemed mere stagnation. (Hyam, 1990: 200–1) Over in the Dutch Indies, the reluctance to create a métis category of nationals stemmed from the fear of creating a whole new class of possible insurgents. Collaborators or insurgents, they posed a threat to European domination. In terms of a more puritanical morality among the colonists, Hyam notes that ‘the 1880s [was] the main watershed, the years which witnessed the final repudiation of earlier “laxity”, the enthronement of a flaccid “respectability”, and the inauguration of a fanatical Purity campaign’ (Hyam, 1990: 201). As racial attitudes hardened, interracial sex was more and more frowned upon and as moral policing intensified, there was a crackdown on concubinage and prostitution. Incidentally, the 1880s was the period of Conrad’s sojourn in the Malay Archipelago. As far as the British were concerned, Eurasians were a marginal group. The Andayas write that ‘[u]sually of mixed Portuguese or Dutch descent, [Eurasians] filled positions such as senior clerks, overseers and


engineers in the state administration’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 180). British prejudice for the half-breed disqualified Eurasians from highranking positions. The Eurasian adoption of European ways (language, dress, customs, hobbies, music, sports, theatre, and so on), which were ‘imitative of British middle-class mores’ (Braga-Blake, 1992: 21), was not just another instance of mimicry. Some Eurasians could lay claim to British ancestry. Nevertheless, they were ‘soiled’ ivory and disavowed as such. Through his fiction, Conrad evokes a colonial ethos in which racial frontiers were constantly being redefined, refined, and reinscribed to justify colonialism itself as an empire run by uncompromising, ‘pure’ or ‘full-blooded’ Europeans from a superior civilization and prestigious race. Time and again, we see how Conrad lampoons the ideas of ‘civilization’ and ‘racial prestige’ as well as the purported ‘Europeans’, who often fall short of the same ‘civilization’ they presume to spread to the savages. Nevertheless, mirroring historical ‘fact’, in his tales, the Serani remains a marginal subject while the romanticized and sympathetic treatment of atypical Eurasians like Nina and Jewel is ‘surplus’ which highlights the moral pitfalls and decay of the West. In the fiction, the Nazarene is the hapless exile, caught between figurative and literal subjectivities: legally white but racially coloured, nationally ‘European’, but culturally ‘Indo’. Conrad’s half-caste reflects an intense debate between history and fiction. The fiction constantly evokes a picture of European moral decay which had, in the first place, necessitated a cultural definition and prescription for citizenship which left many ‘Siranis’ out in the cold. In this debate, and against all conventions, Nina chooses to be Malay rather than be on the side of white hypocrisy. Pushed to the fringes, the symbolic outskirts as it were of colonial society, the Chinese, the Arab, and the half-caste are ideologically invisible but their stories merge to narrativize the future nation-states of Malaysia and Indonesia. Through Conrad’s tales, we can observe a nascent, albeit chimerical, plural society rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of history and time. There is one final riddle to this nebulous society. Where are the Indians in all this? Is the Indian included in the ‘rest of that Pantai band?’ Indians were next in the population tables of the Straits after the Chinese and Malays. In Singapore in 1881, Chinese numbered 87,000, Malays more than 22,000, and Indians a little more than 12,000. Indians arrived in the Straits Settlements and peninsula as indentured coolies, gharry-wallahs, washermen, traders, soldiers, moneylenders, and so on. Conrad’s Indians are Tamil, that is they originate from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. There is a ‘Tamil servant’, the devoted servant of Jim’s fellow patient in the white men’s ward (LJ 12).

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On Nelson’s estate, the head servant is a Tamil boy (TLS 186). In ‘The End of the Tether’, one of the passengers of the Sofala is ‘a wandering Kling’ (258), ‘Kling’ being slang for Indian-Tamil and ‘wandering’ a reference to his immigrant and itinerant status. There is a Tamil gharrywallah as well: the one who drives the skipper of the Patna away into ‘ewigkeit’ (LJ 47) and is never seen again: ‘[The captain] departed, disappeared, vanished, absconded; and absurdly enough it looked as though he had taken that gharry with him, for never again did I come across a sorrel pony with a slit ear and a lackadaisical Tamil driver afflicted by a sore foot’ (LJ 47). Perhaps the uncanny disappearance of the Tamil in this instance is symptomatic of his figurative invisibility in the colonial community and his being perceived as a transient in a world of immigrants and expatriates. Ironically, immigration as economy unites the multifarious community. It is precisely their evanescent bodies which relegate them to the ‘internal frontiers’ of the colonial nation-state. Stoler paraphrases Etienne Balibar’s thoughts on ‘internal frontiers’ thus: a frontier locates both a site of enclosure and contact, of observed passage and exchange. When coupled with the word interior, frontier carries the sense of internal distinctions within a territory (or empire); at the level of the individual, frontier marks the moral predicates by which a subject retains his or her national identity despite location outside the national frontier and despite heterogeneity within the nation-state. (Stoler, 2000: 325) Both in history and in fiction, the colonial state which ostensibly ‘[serves] Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes’ (LJ 13) is a confounding matrix of ‘internal frontiers’ where the ‘purity’ and authority of the British nation is in danger of debasement as ‘other’ trespassing ‘Britons’ and pseudo-compatriots continue to penetrate and challenge the national frontier. Conrad was only too aware of the irony inherent in the state’s re-inscription of its subjects as it pursued its relentless and moral-forcing forward movement in the Malay world.

4 A Vain and Floating Appearance

Sunshine gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs – sunshine and the glitter of the sea. (TU 3) I strained my mental eyesight only to discover that, as with the complexion of all our actions, the shade of difference was so delicate that it was impossible to say. (LJ 197) My eyes were too dazzled by the glitter of the sea below his feet to see him clearly; I am fated never to see him clearly; ... . (LJ 241) Chiefly concerned with the dialogism in Conrad’s East, the previous chapters trace the visual surpluses that both art and history contribute to this imaginary world. This chapter will consider how loopholes in art’s dialogue with history are manifested in the notion of vision itself. Conrad’s fictional ‘surplus’ as a ‘surplus of seeing’ is called into question because vision is itself dialogic and unfinalizable. In his tales, Conrad (1857–1924) himself seems to paint a picture of a world which is elusive to the eye (both the physical eye and the mind’s eye) even to one with ‘excellent eyes’ (V 281) like the rogue Ricardo or to one with penetrating eyes like ‘Red-Eyed Tom’ Lingard: ‘The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression. ... The eyes, as if glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness of their gaze’ (TR 9–10). The preoccupation with eyes, eyesight, and vision is evident throughout Conrad’s Eastern oeuvre. The wily statesman of Sambir, ‘that one-eyed malefactor’ (OI 167) Babalatchi, has an ‘observant eye’ (AF 61) and is shrewd enough to know that the eye is easily deceived as he plots to fool the Dutch officials and Almayer into thinking that Dain Maroola has been killed. Having sighted the boat with three men in it, Wang tries to convince Heyst of what he had seen, 147

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assuring him that he ‘had good eyes’ (V 225). In Conrad’s dialogic, imaginary East, vision is the fundamental uncertainty and even as history’s visual ‘surplus’ may be disavowed as ‘second-hand impressions’, fiction’s ‘surplus’ is itself ambiguous as Conrad constructs a world which is essentially indistinct and illusory and thus inconclusive. In the oft-quoted ‘Author’s Note’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Conrad had laid bare the aims of his literary calling: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see. ... if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity ... (NB 20) With Conrad’s task in mind, Stephen Donovan’s in-depth study, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture, underscores the debt that Conrad owes to the new visual regime gripping his epoch and a society turning more and more to visual entertainment1 in all its bewildering and diverse forms: Wholly distinct from seeing in its everyday sense as well as from the diversions now being offered by a burgeoning array of visual practices, the artistic intention which he famously emphasized in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1987) as ‘by the power of the written word ... to make you see’ should thus be understood as a sustained engagement with the visual dynamics of contemporary popular culture. (Donovan, 2005: 20) Donovan notes that ‘Conrad’s novels themselves succeeded in ‘showing’ Borneo ... to an audience habituated to visual entertainments’ (Donovan, 2005: 24) and that the writer has had to ‘justify the visual truth of [his fiction’s] representations’ (Donovan, 2005: 59). Donovan continues to point out that ‘Conrad would return on numerous occasions to the incompatibility of ... two kinds of visual fidelity, one documentary and “realist,” the other selective and imaginative’ (Donovan, 2005: 61). In a contest which pits the novel against documentary history, Conrad would clearly favour the former; nevertheless, what we encounter in the fiction is a masterful interweaving of both narrative threads ultimately reflecting a middle path of colliding ‘indistinct ideas’, as it were. This ideological clash still does not guarantee an

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unqualified truth; Marlow’s reflections on the ‘truth’ of Jim’s very existence contains the observation that ‘absolute Truth, ... like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery’ (LJ 216). In the Eastern tales, allusions to new viewing technologies and visual amusements abound ranging from moving pictures and magic mirrors to photography and phantasmagoria; all of which serve to magnify the whole notion of vision itself as a cultural construct. Donovan rightly states that ‘popular cultural materials ... assume a variety of functions in Conrad’s writing: as indices of character traits or social relations; as a shorthand for phenomenological or aesthetic experiences; and as organizing tropes within the narratives themselves’ (Donovan, 2005: 6). In this chapter, I argue how this formulation is particularly true of Conrad’s Eastern vision.

The ‘damaged kaleidoscope’ There was, as I walked along, the clear sunshine, a brilliance too passionate to be consoling, the streets full of jumbled bits of colour like a damaged kaleidoscope: yellow, green, blue, dazzling white, the brown nudity of an undraped shoulder, a bullock-cart with a red canopy, a company of native infantry in a drab body with dark heads marching in dusty laced boots, a native policeman in a sombre uniform of scanty cut and belted in patent leather, who looked up at me with orientally pitiful eyes as though his migrating spirit were suffering exceedingly from that unforeseen – what d’ye call them? – avatar – incarnation. Under the shade of a lonely tree in the courtyard, the villagers connected with the assault case sat in a picturesque group, looking like a chromo-lithograph of a camp in a book of Eastern travel. (LJ 157) The passage above is Marlow’s observation of his Eastern surroundings on his way to the court where Jim’s sentence would be set. Obviously, the rather gloomy tone of his descriptions corresponds with the depressing nature of the inquiry itself and his conversation with the accused the night before, in which Jim had refused Brierly’s 200 rupees and his own offer of help. Compare the ‘picturesque group’ above with Jim’s own triumphant proclamation of his Patusan Malays several chapters later: ‘They are like people in a book, aren’t they?’ (LJ 260). Certainly, Conrad’s ordained task, namely that the reader may hear, feel, and see his ‘rescued fragment’ (NB 20), privileges sight above the other senses and foreshadows a scoptophilic drive that would permeate much of his


Eastern tales. In examining this preoccupation with ‘ocular demonstration’ (AF 64), we are compelled to explore the history and culture of visuality in the nineteenth century, along with its models of subjectivity, knowledge, and truth. It was a culture in which vision and its status as truth belonged to the observer. In writing about his literary work, his artistic method, and that of other writers, Conrad would repeatedly employ the rhetoric of visuality; for instance, allusions to ‘angles of vision’ (CL 6: 210), ‘amazing faculty of vision’ (CL 1: 416), ‘the mental vision of your readers’ (CL 2: 200), and his definition of art itself as ‘a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one underlying its every aspect’ (NB 15). For Conrad, the prose artist, like the poet, was the ‘seer par excellence’ (APR 93). To a large degree, he was attempting to establish techniques of looking, ‘to make you see’ (NB 20), comparable with – if not surpassing – any other modern optical device available in the market. For example, Donovan has highlighted Conrad’s declaration to the Boston Evening Telegraph in which ‘Conrad effectively presents literary narrative as historically antecedent and formally superior to motion photography’ (Donovan, 2005: 47): ‘Before the cinematograph was invented ... fiction-writers tried to make moving pictures’ (JCIR 186). However, as evident in the doubleness which characterizes the fiction, Conrad also distrusted the optical devices much favoured by the masses: ‘but where is the thing, institution or principle which I do not doubt’ (CL 1: 203)? The simile, ‘like a damaged kaleidoscope’, is suggestive of the author’s critical stance towards the visual fads of his times. Although he wished ‘to make the reader see’, he did not then insist that the reader sees things his way but only that the reader may see. After all, ‘[e]veryone must walk in the light of his own heart’s gospel’ (CL 1: 253). More importantly, Conrad never pretended that his vision of the East was anything more than illusion which explains why he was chagrined by Hugh Clifford’s (1886–1941) accusation that Mr. Joseph Conrad was guilty of inaccuracies in his representation of the East.2 Conrad regarded his version of the East as his own truth, just as Clifford’s version was ‘his own particular East’ (NB 91). He emphatically rejects the idea of absolute truths: ‘We are too varied. Another man’s truth is only a dismal lie to me’ (CL 1: 253). In the fiction, vision is itself dismantled and is an unstable construct subject to manipulation and fraudulence. More often than not, it is the absence of vision (symbolized trenchantly by the loss of eyesight) which is foregrounded. The absence and insecurity of signs, symbolized by the ease with which marks and traces made on


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the surface of a calm sea are easily blotted out, also suggests a field of vision which is tenuous and phantasmal. Conrad’s East itself is portrayed as mirage-like and prone to erasure and evaporation. Tropes of light, sight, and seeing only serve to emphasize the deceptive nature of vision and the reality or truth it purports to perceive. In the note to his first novel, Conrad cautioned that ‘under the merciless brilliance of the sun, the dazzled eye misses the delicate detail’ (NB 4). Whalley’s Serang declares that ‘[t]he sun makes a very great glare’ (Y 216). Heliéna Krenn observes that Almayer’s life in Sambir illustrates this bedazzlement, that the sunshine figuratively causes him not to see: When the tropical sunshine is mentioned, it is ... mostly an ironic allusion to Almayer’s inability to perceive important truths, for instance, the elements at work between mother and daughter after Nina’s return from Singapore, the relation between the lovers, the intention of Babalatchi who comes to poison him, the identity of the corpse found in the river, the values he rejects with his daughter, the fact that he cannot erase the past by extinguishing its vestiges, and the inhumanity that triumphs with the rejection of love. (Krenn, 1990: 29–30) This chapter will begin by discussing the notion of subjective vision prevalent in Conrad’s epoch and the aesthetic implications this held for his Eastern vision. In writing the East, Conrad ironically deploys the new visual thinking that the sensory idiosyncrasies of the human eye determine optical/visual truth. The optical phenomenon of retinal afterimage, for instance, had altered the way people constructed, perceived, and represented the visible world. In Conrad’s epoch, philosophers like Goethe had propounded that ‘whatever a healthy eye saw was “optical truth,” that there was no such thing as optical illusion. The eye was a model of autonomous vision. The optical experience is produced by and within the person’ (Hirsch, 2000: 11). Scientific optical devices which had been invented to experiment with the eye’s peculiarities were converted into popular entertainment, giving rise to ‘optical toys’ such as the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, and the zoetrope. The rest of the chapter argues that in spite of his acknowledgement of the epistemic changes affecting the way the public viewed the world and the whole notion of vision itself, Conrad deconstructs this same vision and its claims on optical truth in his tropes of ocular handicaps, declining eyesight, and blindness. He ‘[aimed] at stimulating vision in the reader’ (CL 1: 381); at the same time, in the fiction, the imperfections and


subjectivity of vision are manifest in the many blind spots that render Conrad’s fictional world nebulous and opaque. This, in turn, denies the texts any semblance of ideological closure. Nevertheless, in an age where modern optical devices held sway over the public, Conrad seemed to be advocating his craft as a powerful ‘viewing’ instrument, a metaphorical lens through which to see the Malay world and its inhabitants. In this way, he invokes the visual culture in which the sensory input of the eye determines the ‘truth’ of what is seen. At the same time, not unlike the devices which depended on optical tricks to fool the brain, fiction for him was illusion pure and simple. Certainly, the task for him was to emphasize the deceptive nature of vision, and to challenge the notion of visual truth itself which was ‘too phantasmal’ (LJ 174). We can hardly miss the irony that Conrad himself deals with the ‘phantasmal’ or the illusory. In reviewing Clifford’s book of Malayan tales, Studies in Brown Humanity, he points out that the colonial administrator’s fiction is ‘truth unadorned’ (NLL 60) and therefore cannot qualify as literature: ‘to apply artistic standards to this book would be a fundamental error in appreciation. Like faith, enthusiasm, or heroism, art veils part of the truth of life to make the rest appear more splendid, inspiring, or sinister. And this book is only truth, interesting and futile, truth unadorned, simple and straightforward’ (NLL 60). Again, Conrad writes to a friend: ‘The book ... [has] unrivaled knowledge of the subject. But it is not literature’ (CL 2: 57). To Conrad then, literature is in no uncertain terms, ‘truth adorned’; his adornment of the truth lies in presenting the ‘visible world’ (NB 21) to his audiences by recreating a ‘hallucinated vision’ (APR 3). To a large extent, in and through his fiction, Conrad found himself engaged in the invention of a ‘visual’ method which will prove a worthy challenger to any optical device in the market. The kaleidoscope, which ‘exemplifies how science and technology give a subject the appearance of simultaneously being repeated and fragmented’ (Hirsch, 2000: 11), is tellingly ‘damaged’ and Conrad’s ‘visual’ art must intervene ‘to render the highest kind of justice’ (NB 15) to the ‘picturesque group’ (LJ 157).

The camera obscura, human perception and the claims on verity The nineteenth century and the fin de siècle inaugurated the age of optical possibilities, in which the proliferation of viewing gadgets and tools sought to increase the power and range of human vision as well as to reproduce, mass manufacture, and recycle images for public


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consumption. Broadly speaking, there were two categories of optical instruments: firstly, the kind that enhanced the reproducibility of images (e.g. the camera and the lithograph), and secondly, the kind that engaged the peculiarities of the human eye in creating particular visual effects (e.g. the illusion of moving images created by a phenakistiscope, which makes use of the retina’s tendency to retain images). In this second category, there is a long list of devices which creates illusions for the gratification of an ocular public: the kaleidoscope, stereoscope, zoetrope, kinestoscope, magic lantern, and so on. The oft-quoted passage from Lord Jim is worth reproducing here to illustrate Conrad’s preoccupation with visual toys through his characterization of Marlow: All at once, on the blank page, under the very point of the pen, the two figures of Chester and his antique partner, very distinct and complete, would dodge into view with stride and gestures, as is reproduced in the field of some optical toy. I would watch them for a while. No! They were too phantasmal and extravagant to enter into any one’s fate. (LJ 174) Mark B. Sandberg notes that the late nineteenth century was ‘a period that witnessed the development of recording technologies, increased circulation of mass-produced images, invention of a bewildering number of new optical devices, and new institutionalized forms of viewing pitched at the middle classes. All of these factors created new possibilities for a roving patronage of visual culture’ (Sandberg, 1995: 321). It was in the late sixteenth century that the camera obscura began to gain currency as ‘the compulsory site from which vision can be conceived or represented’ (Crary, 1990: 38) and as a figural means with which to define the relations between observer and world, subject and object, mind (intellect) and body (eye), copy and original. The camera obscura was principally designed with artists in mind; it was used to assist them with drawing since it could reproduce linear perspective. The earliest devices were dark rooms (hence, the Latin term ‘camera obscura’ which means ‘dark chamber’) into which an artist physically entered. On one of the four walls, a small aperture allows light to enter and an inverted image of the exterior facing the hole is projected onto the opposite wall. This image is then literally traced over or transcribed by the artist. Over time, the bulky, tent-like apparatuses were replaced by smaller, more portable cameras fitted with mirrors and lenses which produced sharper images, right side up. By the mid-seventeenth century, the artist could stay outside the camera and view the image

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projected onto a translucent window. In the nineteenth century, techniques to fix the image made by the camera obscura on a sensitized, mirror-like metal plate were the among the world’s earliest experiments with photography. By the same century, however, vision as a cultural construct had undergone great transformation: the body, not the apparatus, was the site of knowledge and empirical truth. By the nineteenth century, ‘Goethe’s theory challenged the Aristotelian truthfulness of optical perception by tethering the act of observation with the body, fusing time and vision’ (Hirsch, 2000: 11). Vision belonged to the subject; therefore, the notion of ‘subjective vision’.3 By the same token, subjectivity or the observer’s status was necessarily reshaped. Where or how did Conrad fit into this schema of optical modernity? What did he think of the newfangled optical devices that swamped the marketplace and engendered even more and more sophisticated visual instruments, which turned the image into an amusing, profitable, and reproducible commodity? What impact did the age of repeatable, multiple images (classically exemplified by the photograph, lithograph, and so on) have on his ‘fidelity to the idea and the method’ (CL 2: 417)? What kind of suggestions did he draw from the field of optics? Although Conrad often displayed scepticism towards institutionalized social and cultural trends, he was unable to eschew the far-reaching effects of optical ‘toys’ on his literary imagination and his concept of the observer-subject. Certainly he himself was a part of the new visual order. The modern trend to see with the aid of an external device (for instance through a view-finder) and to capture fleeting images on a two-dimensional plate or surface, are notions that punctuate Conrad’s Eastern prose. By deploying similes and imagery of mechanical looking techniques, his characters appear to perform, or imagine that they are performing, loaded acts of reproduction and representation. In the fiction, allusions are made to the new visual phenomena: ‘the field of some optical toy’ (LJ 174), ‘the silvered plate-glass of a mirror’ (Y 245), and so on. As a metonymy for new techniques of observation, ‘some optical toy’ is a potential challenger to the author’s craft, a mechanical and impersonal contender in the scramble for truth. Jonathan Crary notes that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the presence of a mediating device (e.g. a camera obscura) had the effect of ‘[decorporealizing] vision’: The monadic viewpoint of the individual is authenticated and legitimized by the camera obscura, but the observer’s physical and sensory


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experience is supplanted by the relations between a mechanical apparatus and a pre-given world of objective truth. (Crary, 1990: 39–40) In the epoch preceding the nineteenth century then, the camera obscura was a trope for the human intellect and its ‘reason’-able projections: authoritative, accurate, universal, unchanging truth. In Conrad’s epoch, significant developments in the nineteenth century had seen the reinstatement of the physiological body as the locus of visual truth. However, notwithstanding, the body appeared to remain on the level of machine in the sense that instead of being decorporealized (as with the camera obscura), the observer is now absorbed, bodily as it were, into the machine itself. The observer coupled with the apparatus to produce certain optical effects. Crary posits that the optical paradigm for the nineteenth century was the stereoscope and other instruments like it which required the corporeal adjacency and passivity of the observer, a phenomenon analogous to a worker in an assembly line or a factory worker operating a machine. In Das Capital, Marx examines the notion of human instrumentality: Beginning in the nineteenth century, the relation between eye and optical apparatus becomes one of metonymy: both were now contiguous instruments on the same plane of operation, with varying capabilities and features. The limits and deficiencies of one will be complemented by the capacities of the other and vice versa. The optical apparatus undergoes a shift comparable to that of the tool as described by Marx: ‘From the moment that the tool proper is taken from man, and fitted into a mechanism, a machine takes the place of a mere implement.’ In this sense, other optical instruments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ... had the status of tools. In the older handicraft-based work, Marx explained, a workman ‘makes use of a tool,’ that is, the tool had a metaphoric relation to the innate powers of the human subject. In the factory, Marx contended, the machine makes use of man by subjecting him to a relation of contiguity, of part to other parts, and of exchangeability. He is quite specific about the new metonymic status of the human subject: ‘As soon as man, instead of working with an implement on the subject of his labour, becomes merely the motive power of an implementmachine, it is a mere accident that motive power takes the disguise of human muscle; and it may equally well take the form of wind, water, or steam’. (quoted in Crary, 1990: 130–1)

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These optical devices made no pretences about their mechanical manufacture of illusions. Despite the vivid, three-dimensional effects of the images produced, these instruments ‘make no claim that the real is anything other than a mechanical production’ (Crary, 1990: 132). For many, these entertaining toys were simply viewing apparatuses capable of deceiving the beholder, who is himself in complicity with the device in producing the illusion of ‘the real’. Surrounded by fads or visual mania, Conrad, the artist, was dismissive of them as suggested by the telling reference to ‘some optical toy’. Nevertheless, the conceptual framework of these devices was congenial to Conrad’s own vision. How did Conrad regard and even utilize the new optical toys of the industrial age if indeed, he was as modern as he had asserted: ‘I am modern’ (CL 2: 418, Conrad’s emphasis)? Toys here could refer to amusing devices like the kaleidoscope, or the camera which was not only amusing but also part of a vast reproduction industry. If the image of a ‘damaged kaleidoscope’ (LJ 157) in Lord Jim is anything to go by, there does seem to be a tacit criticism of scopic modernity just as there was a clear disapproval of steamships and newer, faster, more efficient modes of telecommunications and transport. Nevertheless, in a climate of everincreasing visual consciousness, it is not hard to imagine that Conrad (as were his peers) was compelled, reluctantly or not, to validate his ‘visible world’ using the same figural devices and visual idioms. In fact, surrounded by optical toys, he sometimes found them a valuable if somewhat dubious aid or collaborator for truth although tensions continued to persist between novelistic truth and photographic truth in so far as the photograph was symbolic of scopic modernity. Photographic truth is also subsumed under journalistic truth, the nineteenth century seeing the rise of photojournalism and news articles accompanied by photograph-based etchings, engravings, and lithographs. The photograph of the last ship’s captain and his lover in The Shadow-Line is ‘that amazing human document’: ‘positive evidence of [the affair] existed in the shape of a photograph taken in Haiphong’ (TSL 87). For Conrad, however, the art of fiction ‘puts to shame the pride of documentary history’ (APR 15). Nevertheless, the task at hand which is ‘to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe’ (NB 15) was Herculean, and Conrad’s Eastern tales do contain visual human documents (printcopies, photographs, lithographs, etc.) which serve to augment the faculty of memory by capturing images in time. For Conrad, ‘[t]he problem was to make unfamiliar things credible. To do that [he] had to create for them, to reproduce for them, to envelop them in their proper atmosphere of actuality. This was the hardest task of all and the most important, in


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view of that conscientious rendering of truth in thought and fact which has been always [his] aim’ (NB 129–30, emphasis added). Conrad’s choices of visual metaphors or similes also draw from the mechanical cousins of the camera obscura in the nineteenth century. These are inventions which, although not strictly ‘optical’, had ushered in the age of repeatable, multiple print-images as well as even more novel methods of observation and representation: lithography and its younger sibling, photography, for instance. Even though lithography may not be considered machinic in its makeup, the ‘tool’ is worthless without its printing arm. Lithography is essentially a ‘tool-making’ art and the ‘tool’, that is the lithographic plate, becomes a contiguous part of a process of chemical printmaking which usually takes place in a workshop. In this sense, the lithographer is metonymic of a machine where both tool and human motive power are in a relation of contiguity. Both lithography and photography were machines designed to reproduce images. Kathleen Stewart Howe writes: ‘Invented a scant forty years apart, lithography and photography emerged from the same background that spawned the industrialized multiplication and reproduction of images’ (Howe, 1998: viii). In fact, in the 1850s, both forms merged into photolithography, in which photographic images were lithographed resulting in multiple impressions. The principle behind both inventions is similar: the commercial reproduction of pictures. How these landmarks in the graphic arts impacted the art of the novelist has epistemological inferences as the example below will illustrate. In ‘Youth’, the young Marlow enthuses to his listeners: ‘And this is how I see the East’ (Y 37, emphasis added) before launching into an aestheticized word-painting of mountain, mist, ‘scorching blue sea’, and so on: And this is how I see the East. I have seen its secret places and have looked into its very soul; but now I see it always from a small boat, a high outline of mountains, blue and afar in the morning; like faint mist at noon; a jagged wall of purple at sunset. I have the feel of the oar in my hand, the vision of a scorching blue sea in my eyes. And I see a bay, a wide bay, smooth as glass and polished like ice, shimmering in the dark. A red light burns far off upon the gloom of the land, and the night is soft and warm. We drag at the oars with aching arms, and suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night – the first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight. (Y 37)


The use of the timeless present tense in ‘now I see it always’, ‘I have’, ‘I see’, ‘light burns’, and ‘comes out’ suggests an experience which is repeatable and will be identical no matter how frequently undergone. What Marlow does here is not unlike what a lithographer does: fashion a lithographic plate which will be able to replicate the exact same picture every time. In the same way, Conrad hoped to reproduce his vision of the East to satisfy the nineteenth-century desire for images. This is also his way of assuring the audience that his vision is true: ‘it is the same picture’ (NB 4) as the original representation. So determined is he to do this that if the template fails, he will doggedly return to the drawing board, so to speak: ‘I aim at stimulating vision in the reader. If after reading ... you don’t see my man then I’ve absolutely failed and must begin again – or leave the thing alone’4 (CL 1: 381, Conrad’s emphasis). As such, in spite of his scepticism for the new toys of his age, Conrad invokes the visual culture of his times to validate his vision of the East.

The visual versus the textual In the nineteenth century, the empire abroad was consumed as a largely pictorial (or as Conrad would term it: ‘picturesque’) commodity. One need only think of the plethora of images relayed to England from the colonies, depicting, advertising, or publicizing the vicissitudes, romance, and agonies of life in the Eastern tropics. Back in the metropolis, in its many workshops and printing houses, these images were then fixed, developed, and disseminated on a mass scale and even retransmitted to the tropics from where they came. Through the industrialized art of mimesis, copies and imitations entered the marketplace. Engravings in The Illustrated London News (the world’s first picture weekly launched in 1842) and The Graphic, reproductions of John Thomson’s (1837–1921) photographs and Marianne North’s (1830–90) paintings, reproductions of negatives and a host of other etchings, lithographs, sketches, and so on were readily lapped up by an image- and exotica-hungry nation. By the 1880s, photography, once the preserve of a few, had become a hobby accessible to the middle-class stratum of society. By 1895, the pocket Kodak camera had democratized the art of photography, making it available to the status-driven masses and enabling them to construct their individual views of the world. Many other forms of reproduction, for instance lithography and engraving, merged with photography in creative ways in the quest for the ‘perfect’ image, so to speak. ‘Toys’ like the stereoscope also found an industrial collaborator in photography. Photographic stereo cards replaced older pictures, rendering


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the 3-dimensional visual illusion even more ‘magical’. An ‘image bank’ was duly set up for the stereo craze which lasted well up to 1910. In The End of the Tether, among Van Wyk’s mail delivered to him by the Sofala is ‘the Graphic in its world-wide green wrappers’ and ‘an illustrated Dutch publication without a cover’ (Y 279). Like Conrad, Frank Swettenham (1850–1948), the scholar-administrator and Malaya-hand, had also deemed it necessary to jump onto the bandwagon, albeit adopting the wry stance that prose narratives could do the job equally well if not better than, say, photographs: The fact that the comparative exactness of a photograph often conveys a poorer idea of a scene than a very indifferently-painted sketch, gives encouragement, and some justification, to an accurate and truth-loving observer, who honestly tries, with however little success, to share his pleasant experiences with those who may never have the opportunity of seeing with their own eyes what he has seen. (Swettenham, 1993: 206–7) Swettenham’s ‘truth-loving observer’ is naturally an author and ‘sketch’ here clearly stands for prose. A few points are made here: that writing (especially descriptive writing) functions no differently from a photograph. Semantically, ‘sketch’ is a versatile term, equally at home with the family of meanings associated with painting, writing, drama and perhaps even photography. Indeed, William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800–77) seminal book of pictures was titled The Pencil of Nature (1844). He was the inventor of the ‘calotype’ which remains the basis of all photographic methods today. For Swettenham, the photo’s ‘exactness’ to the original is ‘comparative’. A ‘very indifferently-painted’ piece of writing may convey a better idea of a scene than a photograph. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of visual modernity is so pervasive that two of Clifford’s collections of Malay stories are titled Malayan Monochromes and Studies in Brown Humanity: Being Scrawls and Smudges in Sepia, White, and Yellow. As for Conrad, however much or little he might have been influenced by the new visual trends and ideas of visual truth, he characteristically rejected the dogmas of man’s making.

The white man’s vision Although a creature of his times, Conrad was too independent to be straitjacketed by the current trends of visuality. Vision in the fiction is almost always fleeting and deceptive: assuring to some, confounding to

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others. The observer-subject as the site and repository of truth is frequently contested and challenged. In The Rescue and ‘The End of the Tether’, the confused visual signals which afflict the crew provide striking and ironic examples. On board the Lightning, the Malay seamen detect the presence of Carter’s boat, which Shaw and ‘Red-Eyed Tom’ (TR 9) Lingard himself miss. It appears that the native crew possesses something that outdoes the technology of viewing instruments: ‘I am Sali, and my eyes are better than the bewitched brass thing that pulls out to a great length’ (TR 16). In ‘The End of the Tether’, the Malay Serang, operating mainly without the aid of external devices, ‘was not troubled by any intellectual mistrust of his senses’ (Y 229). Captain Whalley had steered his vessel too close to the bar, something the Serang knows but chooses to hold his peace. The record of the visual world fell through [the Serang’s] eyes upon his unspeculating mind as on a sensitized plate through the lens of a camera. His knowledge was absolute and precise; nevertheless, had he been asked his opinion, and especially if questioned in the downright, alarming manner of white men, he would have displayed the hesitation of ignorance. (Y 228) The Malay is portrayed as a seer who trusted the veracity of his senses; however, his dependence on his senses is that of an innocent, ‘unspeculating mind’. Ironically, the native’s innocent point of view only serves to support the fallacy of his white master’s vision in that the Malay went along with whatever his Tuan saw or did not see although it might run counter to the facts that the Malay knew. When Lingard asks Haji Wasub why he had not reported the facts to him, the latter implies that his ‘training’ is never to contradict the inscrutable white Tuan: ‘Malim [Shaw] spoke. He said: “Nothing there”, while I could see. How could I know what was in his mind or yours, Tuan?’ (TR 27–8). This episode is revealing in that it suggests that the mysterious white Tuan is prone to making visual mistakes and miscalculations and that his occult-minded native crewmembers are not wont to contradict him despite the obvious imprecision of what is perceived. In this way, vision is ‘subjective’ in the other sense of the word: lacking objectivity, dependent on the subject and the subject’s biases and whims. The natives are portrayed as uncomprehending, obedient, almost indulgent, and unquestioning, ‘accomplices’ in the creation of the white man’s illusion. As such, although Captain Whalley’s Serang ‘was certain of his facts ... such a certitude counted for little against the doubt


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what answer would be pleasing’ (Y 228). The superstitious Malay, in his appraisal of his white master’s obscure ways and dubious motives, can only conclude that the white Tuan is inscrutable and best left unprovoked. Whalley’s Serang, despite years of serving the white man, ‘had remained as incapable of penetrating the simplest motives of those he served as they themselves were incapable of detecting through the crust of the earth the secret nature of its heart’ (Y 228). ‘He had known in his life white men indulge in outbreaks equally strange. He was only genuinely interested to see what would come of it’ (Y 229). In all, the white master was a riddle: a puzzling, capricious specimen with magical, occult powers. As such, Lingard’s Serang rebukes Sali, the helmsman, for insisting on having seen a boat when Shaw had not: ‘The order is to keep silence and mind the rudder, lest evil befall the ship’ (TR 16). For the natives, the powerful white man’s actions and behaviour are mysterious, ‘irrational’, arcane, and duplicitous and their visions had best be humoured and left unchallenged. Robert Hampson’s reading of the incident offers a similar appraisal: ‘European behaviour and thinking is presented as the object of Malay knowledge, and there is a perception of the incomprehensibility, the otherness, of the European to the Malay’ (Hampson, 2000: 170). The irony is doubleedged: the Malay and his ‘absolute and precise’ knowledge and ‘unspeculating mind’ as well as the strange, elusive motives of white men themselves who believe their visual observations and ‘mental eyesight’ (LJ 197) to be the categorical truth. It appears that at times the querulous natives do not question the arbitrary white man’s judgements on pain of supernatural retribution. At other times, they reckon that the white Tuan must have his own furtive reasons for seeing or not seeing what their own eyes so clearly detect. In Lord Jim, the Patna’s crew is tried before a court of inquiry in which the ‘extraordinary and damning’ native helmsman called to the witness stand does not believe that Jim and company had jumped ship to save their own lives: ‘There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, ... he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years’ (LJ 98–9). The irony in the portrayal of exploited natives whose service to the Tuan Putih is driven by superstition and awe of the Tuan Putih’s ‘true’ motives (or ‘racial prestige’) can hardly be missed. Hampson also suggests that impassivity on the part of the natives ‘is not allowed to be read as absence of subjectivity: the Malay seamen are shown to have a critical attitude towards the European officer; and their impassivity is disclosed, not as an essential

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characteristic, but as a mode of behaviour adopted within an appreciation of the power structure of their relations with the Europeans’ (Hampson, 2000: 170). Donovan reads Whalley’s Serang’s surveillance of the seas around him as a form of visual impassivity: [Conrad] casually elides photography with ‘blind’ faith in sensory experience in an orientalizing portrait of the serang helmsman in ‘The End of the Tether’: ‘The record of the visual world fell through his eyes upon his unspeculating mind as on a sensitized plate through the lens of a camera’ (Y 228). Remarks like these indicate that Conrad saw photography as defined by undiscriminating inclusiveness and relentless equivalence, in effect, as a mere footprint of the visual. (Donovan, 2005: 28) Donovan also suggests that the occidental subject is not immune to this undiscriminating lens. Marlow ‘admits to his fatal naivety about the ways of the world’ (Donovan, 2005: 28): ‘My weakness consists in not having a discriminating eye for the incidental. ... A confounded democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blindness, but has been of no advantage to me’ (LJ 94). ‘Blind’ faith, both literal and figurative, is precisely what afflicts many of Conrad’s Eastern expatriates. Later on in the chapter, I will turn to the captain of the Sofala in ‘The End of the Tether’ to illustrate a ‘blind’ faith which proves fatal in more than one sense.

Sun, sea and sand: of blankness and blind spots in the mirror of the sea In Conrad’s East, the sea is a vast and potentially distorting mirror where refracted and fragmented images abound and where reflections rather than the thing itself are emphasized. The imagery Conrad employs again and again in describing his fictional land and seascape evokes a nebulous and hazy setting where things are not quite what they appear to be. In the course of writing his first Malay romance, he writes: ‘Everything is still chaos, but, slowly, ghosts are transformed into living flesh, floating vapours turn solid, and – who knows? – perhaps something will be born from the collision of indistinct ideas’ (CL 1: 151). The ‘who knows’ tellingly suggests a possibility rather than a certainty. Nevertheless, despite its unsettling and disorienting effects, ‘chaos’ was certainly what the creative writer thrived on.


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In Orientalist literature, terra incognita is a familiar and pervasive leitmotif. A pristine, undiscovered, uncharted region offers itself up for, indeed, demands scrutiny, appropriation, inscription, and mapping. This is almost like the blank sheets of paper which would preoccupy Conrad for most, if not all, of his writing life. Agonize as he did over the exasperating vagaries and problems of his craft, Conrad would unfailingly be inspired (and occasionally petrified) by the very sight of blank pages: ‘My heart is in my boots when I look at the white sheets’ (CL 1: 342). As a trope, empty sheets of paper evoke the liminal ‘non-place’, the fictional space which it is the artist’s duty to populate with his ‘people’ and in the process face the possibility of writer’s block: ‘Now I’ve got all my people together I don’t know what to do with them’ (CL 1: 288). This blank sheet is not only a metaphorical write-able surface but also points to the sheer absence of signs. Blankness suggests ‘nothing to see’. Blankness is also a semiotic space emptied of signs, vacant, and vulnerable to inscription. The Malay world as that blank surface invites inscription but it also confounds inscription as symbolized by the many blind spots which constrain and undermine the construction of reality in the texts. In his evaluation of Guy de Maupassant’s (1850–93) art, Conrad praises the latter’s ability to avoid the many pitfalls that beset a writer: ‘He will not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment, of eloquence, of humour, of pathos; of all that splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank sheet of paper’ (NLL 26). The faults which imperil the writing’s integrity prevent a writer from achieving ‘the vouchsafed vision of excellence’ (NLL 26, emphasis added). It is tempting and even natural at this point to include the seduction of vision to the ‘pageant of faults’ mentioned by Conrad. In Conrad’s Malay tales, images of blank surfaces abound. For instance, the white of the clothes worn by the protagonists is a condensed metonymic figure for blank surfaces: Lord Jim is ‘apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat’ (LJ 3) and Nina is ‘all in white’ (AF 17), a ‘dazzling white figure’ (AF 194). Davidson describes Heyst: ‘I saw a man in white’ (V 52). The white favoured by colonialists in the tropics serves as a surface for inscription. A white page is a blank surface, and so are a white sandy beach, ‘dazzling sand-banks’ (TLS 171), white clothes, and even a white body. In the Malay stories, the sea itself is almost always a luminous, light-infused surface on which one could draw lines: The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea presented a shiny surface under the light of a bull’s-eye lamp lashed to a stanchion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface of

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the waters ... when [Jim] happened to glance back he saw the white streak of the wake drawn as straight by the ship’s keel upon the sea as the black line drawn by the pencil upon the chart. (LJ 20) Marks and traces can be easily made on blank surfaces and just as easily erased. Almayer erases all signs of Nina’s departure by covering her footprints in the sandy beach with more sand. In An Outcast of the Islands, Lingard tears up the offensive note that Willems had sent him (effectively erasing the message) only to try and reassemble the torn fragments of paper. Marlow is a prolific letter writer in Lord Jim; figures ‘dodge into view with stride and gestures’ (LJ 174) on the blank page. In a world where blank spaces are foregrounded, both white and brown characters impulsively scan the landscape for signs. It is significant that Wang in Victory scours the walls of the principal bungalow as if for signs soon after his master brings home a woman to the island. Perhaps signs which may explain the uncharacteristic behaviour of Heyst: ‘The Chinaman stood still with roaming eyes, examining the walls as if for signs, for inscriptions; exploring the floor as if for pitfalls, for dropped coins’ (V 189). Faces are also symbolic written surfaces, open to (mis)reading and interpretation. Ricardo in Victory prides himself on his ability to read faces: ‘He had excellent eyes, ... . He was confident that he could form some opinion about her – ... It all depended on his reading of the face’ (V 281–2). Almayer’s own hyperbolic forgetting of Nina results in the blank expression of ‘a face from which all feelings and all expression are suddenly wiped off ‘ (AF 196). ‘The face was a blank, ... . All passion, regret, grief, hope, or anger – all were gone, erased by the hand of fate’ (AF 190). Pata Hassim’s message to Lingard through Jafffir to ‘Depart and forget!’ (TR 82) is another symbolic exhortation to obliterate all traces of their friendship from the proverbial face of the Earth. In sum, characters in the stories perform acts of tracing and erasing, neither of which ever totally succeeds. Almayer fails to forget and Lingard refuses to depart although he would eventually disappear without a trace in England. Even the burying of Nina’s footprints in the sand leaves visible traces of her departure from her father’s life: ‘a line of miniature graves right down to the water’ (AF 195). In his effort to erase the memory of Nina, Almayer inadvertently forms yet another memory of her: the heaps of sand piled over her footprints are a symbolic memorialization of Nina Almayer. Inevitably, these ‘miniature graves’ will also eventually be erased by the rising tides. What this implies is that the imaginary East is an unstable construct: alternately erected and dismantled, written but


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prone to deletion, a construct caught between its own inscription and erasure, existence, and oblivion, ‘like a building through leaves, both distinct – and hidden’5 (CL1: 331). One is reminded of the obnoxious skipper of the Patna whose unqualified exit from the scene had struck Marlow: ‘He departed, disappeared, vanished, absconded; and absurdly enough it looked as though he had taken that gharry with him’ (LJ 47). On Marlow’s last day with Jim, the elements and landscape seem to mirror the notional erasure of Jim’s very existence and reality: I don’t know why, listening to him, I should have noted so distinctly the gradual darkening of the river, of the air; the irresistible slow work of the night settling silently on all the visible forms, effacing the outlines, burying the shapes deeper and deeper, like a steady fall of impalpable black dust. (LJ 306) In Conrad’s Malay world, assumptions of accurate surveillance and judgement are more often than not false, revealing the fallacy and treachery of both physical and mental eyesight. Ultimately, the villainous ‘excellent eyes’ (V 281) of Ricardo and the ‘exceptional powers of observation’ (Y 255) of Mr. Sterne bring about tragic consequences. Ricardo’s summing up of Lena is entirely wrong: her loyalty to Heyst is unflinching even in the face of grave danger. Mr. Sterne may have detected Captain Whalley’s descent to blindness correctly but driven by personal ambition, his observation is tinged with malice and self-seeking. In the course of reading the signs which fill the void spaces or surfaces, many are deceived and deluded by their observations. In some cases, ‘ocular demonstration’ (AF 64) and the ‘whole field of their vision’ (V 269) constitute a vast blind spot which leads to disaster and death as the following discussion of ‘The End of the Tether’ will illustrate.

The End of Vision’s Tether The story of Captain Harry Whalley does not attend to the imperial scramble for the Malay Archipelago as explicitly as the Lingard trilogy but is nonetheless set in a time and place irrevocably altered by the forces of such a rivalry and its residual effects. It can be argued that in the story of Captain Whalley’s deteriorating eyesight and his anxious effort to disguise it, a central theme revolves around the colonial gaze of mastery and the inherent fault lines which render it unstable and false. Whalley’s ‘dimmed eyes’ (Y 321) also signify the failure of visual truth in an age when vision (or visual truth) was the preserve of the observer-subject. In

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a visual culture of subjective/autonomous vision, the subject is the ‘seer par excellence’ (APR 93). Seeing begins and ends in the subject. However, subjective vision is ‘subjective’ not only in the sense that it begins and ends in the seer but also ‘subjective’ in the sense that it lacks objectivity and is imaginary, subject to flux and fancy. In ‘The End of the Tether’, the memory of ‘Dare-devil Harry’ of the famous clipper, the Condor, and his maritime achievements as the ‘pioneer of new routes and new trades’ (Y 167), and after whom a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef had been named, is cast against the onset of modernity symbolized by the ‘piercing of the Isthmus of Suez’ (Y 168). ‘[This single event] had changed the face of the Eastern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that [Whalley’s] early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen’ (Y 168). Whalley’s rhetoric is the white man’s lament for the passing of a glorious and celebrated epoch when individual initiative, ‘venturesomeness’ and discovery contributed significantly to the development of trade, merchant shipping, and the opening up of new markets: Somebody must lead the way. I just showed that the thing could be done; but you men brought up to the use of steam cannot conceive the vast importance of my bit of venturesomeness to the Eastern trade of the time. Why, that new route reduced the average time of a southern passage by eleven days for more than half the year. Eleven days! It’s on record. (Y 286) The professional Whalley who ‘can look further back even – on a whole half-century’ (Y 285) has been rendered obsolete by forces beyond his control. The pathos of the ‘aristocratic’ (Y 181) Whalley’s desperate situation (poor, bereft of ship, home, and wife, and with a daughter practically ‘homeless’ in a boarding house) is exacerbated by one very important factor: his descent to physical blindness. The deterioration of sight, apart from its devastating consequence for a sailor who relies on sight for navigation (‘A ship’s un-seaworthy when her captain can’t see. I am going blind’ [Y 300]), is also crippling to one whose authoritative reading and piloting of the Eastern landscape had given credence to his colonial vision. Whalley’s blindness is thus not only literal but also figurative. The younger Whalley was one of those seamen whose personal enterprise and exploits (like those of the adventurer Rajah James Brooke (1803–68)) ‘had for the colony enough importance to be looked after by a Queen’s ship’ (Y 193). The walk along the Singapore Esplanade triggers


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a flood of memories about the early days of the settlement and the former Governor Denham. The Master-Attendant Ned Eliott’s intrusion only stirs up more talk on the fortunes of the settlement which ‘ran itself’ (Y 199). Colonial politics is not foreign to Whalley who would have been once ‘the only other serious candidate’ (Y 197) to the post of Master-Attendant, the post of a Government official. To his Dutch confidant, Van Wyk, Whalley yarns nostalgically about the old days in ‘forty-seven’ when piracy had been rife and when Van Wyk’s Sultan’s grandfather ‘had been notorious as a great protector of the piratical fleets of praus from farther East. They had a safe refuge in the river at Batu Beru. He financed more especially a Balinini chief called Haji Daman’ (Y 287). In this yarn within a yarn, Whalley’s unshakeable image of the East is an East which is in need of ‘moral-forcing’ improvement: A good cigar was better than a knock on the head – the sort of welcome he would have found on this river forty or fifty years ago. Then leaning forward slightly, he became earnestly serious. It seems as if, outside their own sea-gipsy tribes, these rovers had hated all mankind with an incomprehensible, bloodthirsty hatred. Meantime, their depredations had been stopped, and what was the consequence? The new generation was orderly, peaceable, settled in prosperous villages. He could speak from personal knowledge. And even the few survivors of that time – old men now – had changed so much, that it would have been unkind to remember against them that they had ever slit a throat in their lives. He had one especially in his mind’s eye: a dignified, venerable headman of a certain large coast village about sixty miles sou’west of Tampasuk. It did one’s heart good to see him – to hear that man speak. He might have been a ferocious savage once. What men wanted was to be checked by superior intelligence, by superior knowledge, by superior force, too – yes, by force held in trust from God and sanctified by its use in accordance with His declared will. (Y 288–9) Whalley’s conviction in the civilizing mission and presumption of white superiority are regarded by Van Wyk with skepticism. Nevertheless, the latter grows to like the paternalistic Whalley with his ‘large, tolerating certitude’ (Y 289) and whose belief in the advantages of a moral, superior and godly Empire was unassailable. Firstly, to appreciate how the postulation that ‘fiction is history’ is manifest in this story, the allusion to sea gypsies in this story warrants closer scrutiny. In the passage above, Whalley justifies the Western

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conquest of marauding rovers who constitute sea gypsy tribes. These tribes are the orang laut6 who in the nineteenth century were still synonymous with piracy. These communities were to be found in the Riau (or Rhio in Conrad and other colonial writings) Archipelago, which falls geographically within Whalley’s route. The routine ‘old round of 1,600 miles and thirty days’, ‘up and down the Straits ... Malacca to begin with’ (Y 167, 166) on board the Sofala brings Captain Whalley and his crew very close to the abode of ‘a sort of outcast tribe’ (Y 244). In the text, the narrator describes the ‘brown and emaciated’ (Y 244) families of this particular tribe as ‘long-haired, lean, and wild-eyed people’ (Y 244). Nineteenth-century writings depict the orang laut as a ‘lower class of Malays’ who behaved like ‘wild animals’ (quoted in Chou, 2003: 7), and in a twelfth-century Chinese record, the orang laut are described as that ‘variety of wild men from near the sea which can live in water without closing the eyes’ (quoted in Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 13). Based on the description gleaned from these historical records, it is reasonable to deduce that the wild-eyed ‘outcast tribe’ (Y 244) that is alluded to in the story can be categorized as orang laut or orang suku laut: diverse aquatic and nomadic communities or tribes who, before piracy was outlawed and eliminated by European powers, used to supplement their incomes as seasonal rovers even in the precolonial era. The orang laut’s raiding activities had been stamped out by the time of An Outcast of the Island and Almayer’s Folly, as the description of Babalatchi’s erstwhile occupation reveals: ‘He was a vagabond of the seas, a true Orang-Laut, living by rapine and plunder of coasts and ships in his prosperous days; earning his living by honest and irksome toil when the days of adversity were upon him’ (OI 50). In Almayer’s Folly, Babalatchi bemoans the passing of ‘the old times ... before an English Rajah ruled in Kuching’ (AF 206). Although Babalatchi is of Sulu origin, Conrad classifies him as well as the Balinini (also from Sulu) under the more generic label for pirates, namely orang laut. This simplification nevertheless includes sea-gypsy tribes which refer to a more specific grouping of ‘pirates’. In the nineteenth century, the orang laut of north Borneo, the Bajau, were forced to turn from the sea to dry land as a result of permanent changes brought about by the British North Borneo Company (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 132). In An Outcast of the Islands, Almayer’s servant, Ali, looks on the Bajau with a jaundiced eye: ‘[Mahmat] Banjer and his two brothers were Bajow vagabonds ... Everybody knew they were bad’ (OI 250). It is safe to say that ‘The End of the Tether’ shares more or less a similar timeframe as these two novels, that is in about the 1880s, because


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Whalley relates his experiences ‘forty or fifty years’ (Y 288) after piracy had been effectively eradicated by the Dutch and British authorities. The history books tell us that ‘[b]y the 1870s piracy in peninsular waters had been effectively eradicated’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 131). Incidentally, in 1846, James Brooke, the English rajah who ruled in Kuching, had crushed what was deemed as ‘piracy’ among the Ibans of Sarawak. From the mid 1830s onwards, concerted and coordinated efforts by both the British and Dutch did much to dislodge and dispossess many of the archipelago’s maritime peoples. Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the archipelago did not always mean friction and disagreement between two imperial powers; it could also sometimes lead to cooperation especially when fighting a common enemy such as piracy, which went far beyond the pale of European civilized morality and was a threat to commercial activities. In fact, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 pledged European cooperation: the combination of European resources such as steam-powered gunboats and superior artillery ‘was to have farreaching results’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 131). Historical accounts shed light on the political and economic roles played by the orang laut or sea gypsies before they were to be displaced by the European scramble for the lucrative seaborne trade. Their military function as the navy for native kingdoms and their economic role as gatherers of marine products for the China trade are well documented. Historians generally agree that the campaign against piracy had far-reaching adverse impacts on the regional trading patterns and native shipping. The sea people, for whom trading and raiding were parts of a cultural heritage, were the ‘hapless victims of European determination to safeguard commerce in the region’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 132). ‘By the mid-nineteenth century Malay and orang laut participation in this seaborne trade had been all but eliminated. In the Singapore region the orang laut were fast disappearing as an identifiable group’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 132–3). Clearly, the identity of the sea gypsies had been irrevocably eroded by the disruptive forces of imperialism. It can be argued that for a reader informed of history, the knowledge of this historical background of sea gypsy displacement and de-culturation unsettles Whalley’s vision and surveillance of ‘civilized’ sea gypsies whom he is certain have benefited and prospered after the anti-piracy campaign. Hence, his ‘personal knowledge’ or vision/judgement is called into question. In juxtaposing two incompatible images of sea gypsies: the narrator’s image of ‘miserable, half-naked families’ (Y 244) and Whalley’s image of a reformed, prosperous ‘new generation’ (Y 288), the text evokes a conflicting and ironic picture. Conrad must have


encountered some of these sea gypsies in his many voyages in the archipelago and learnt/heard about their history. However, what is certain is that he intended to ironize and question Whalley’s idealized vision of imperialism. Conrad’s fictional East is deliberately set up as an unstable construct ‘whose true outlines eluded the eye’ (Y 243) and where meaning is constantly making and unmaking itself. Taken as a whole, history sheds light on the absent meanings within Conrad’s narrative even as Conrad’s ‘own particular East’ (NB 91) seems to dramatize the cracks and blind spots apparent in Empire’s civilizing mission as propagated and run in the course of history. Furthermore, if ‘history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting – on second-hand impression’ (NLL 17), then the validity of historical accounts themselves can be disputed since so much depends on the authenticity of historical testimonies, papers, and records. In this way, contesting and contestable versions of ‘history’ conspire to blur the ‘true outlines’ (Y 243) of the East. In this chapter and elsewhere, I have tried to argue that assumptions of accurate surveillance, judgement, and visual truth in Conrad’s fictional East are more often than not false, revealing the fallacy of sight and vision. Whalley’s own dimmed vision is both literal and figurative; he believes wrongly that his pretense of sightedness has been successful when he tells Van Wyk, ‘I’ve deceived them all. Nobody knows’ (Y 300). He also believes or sees wrongly that the sea gypsies’ lot has been improved by the imperial enterprise. The text itself exposes the fallacy of Whalley’s vision. Some of the nomadic sea gypsy tribes that Whalley envisions as living in prosperous villages are encountered off Pangu bay languishing in a state of abject poverty and deprivation. These outcast and castaway communities of Conrad’s Malay world are the indirect products of a long history of colonial encounters: an Eastern version of one of the ‘vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’ (Last Essays 17). To sum up, Whalley’s colonial blind spot foreshadows his ‘dimmed eyes’ (Y 321). Significantly, when the rocky formations in the vicinity of the sea gypsies’ habitat are described, an allusion to photography is made: Within the knots and loops of the rocks the water rested more transparent than crystal under their crooked and leaky canoes, ... and the men seemed to hang in the air, ... fishing patiently ... Everything remained still, crushed by the overwhelming power of the light; and the whole group, opaque in the sunshine, – the rocks resembling


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pinnacles, the rocks resembling spires, the rocks resembling ruins; the forms of islets resembling beehives, resembling mole-hills; the islets recalling the shapes of haystacks, the contours of ivy-clad towers, – would stand reflected together upside down in the unwrinkled water, like carved toys of ebony disposed on the silvered plate-glass of a mirror. (Y 244–5, emphasis added) The third-person narrator is essentially describing a silhouette of black rocks and islets but he notes their resemblances to distinctly European images. In the ‘overwhelming power of the light’, he sees recognizably British landmarks and icons such as ‘spires’, ‘mole-hills’, ‘haystacks’, and ‘ivy-clad towers.’ It can be said that to the narrator, that resemblance/vision of Britain and its image captured upside down on a lightsensitive or iodized ‘silvered plate-glass of a mirror’ (the image inverted as it would be on a photographic plate or on the human retina), as it were, is a ‘documentary’ record of the world and hence an exact copy of reality. A similar passage occurs in ‘The Secret Sharer’, in which the narrator spies ‘a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses’, the foundation of which is set in a ‘solid’, ‘still and stable sea’ (TLS 91). The narrator’s ‘roaming eyes’ have effectively ‘fixed’ the image as implied by the solidity of its foundation. It can be argued that these allusions to photography, when considered in the light of Conrad’s distrust of ‘optical toys’, reveal his artistic concession to modernity; however, they are also occasions for ironic commentary. It is evident that Conrad’s deployment of photography as trope exposes how the photograph ‘speaks very much to a sense of power in the way we seek to order and construct the world around us’ (Clarke, G., 1997: 11). It is possible to say here that the process of regulating or organizing the visible world is a highly subjective one. In the way he seeks to order his world, Whalley displays a visual subjectivity which adds to his tragic story. Apart from the evocatively ‘photographic’ image of the ebony rocks, the narrator of ‘The End of the Tether’ also sees the wretched orang laut, who present a starkly contrasting picture when placed alongside the constructed images of a ‘superior’ and progressive English home with its high culture and civilization: a montage of morals (‘spire’), history (‘ruins’), education (‘ivy-clad towers’), and other exalted institutions. What the narrative seems tacitly to suggest is that Whalley’s boast about the success of the civilizing mission is hopelessly misguided. What must also be obviously visible to the eye, or more accurately, the mind’s eye or ‘mental eyesight’ (LJ 197), namely the abject conditions of the sea gypsies,

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is rendered invisible or simply not registered. As the visual ‘organization’ of the rocky scene symbolizes, vision and visual information can be influenced, ordered, and constructed by a sense of nostalgia or a stubborn belief in the nobility of the colonial mission. Literally and metaphorically, the crushing tropical light can play tricks with the eye. In ‘The Secret Sharer’, the narrator admits that ‘[t]here must have been some glare in the air to interfere with one’s sight’ (TLS 92). ‘[C]rushed by the overwhelming power of the light’, the observer is prone to make visual miscalculations. This is reflected in Whalley’s failure to recognize that his colonial vision of how the natives’ lot has been improved is fundamentally clouded by his unerring conviction in the moral rightness of it all. Even if Whalley speaks with pride about the reformed headman who ‘might have been a ferocious savage once’ (Y 289), the authority of his ‘selective’ vision is still undermined by the reality that entire populations had been dislocated and robbed of their heritage. The imposition of European values on native cultural processes, the wholesale dislocation of peoples, and the disruption of a whole way of life must surely be counted as serious errors of judgement. In the blinding light, the rocks are transfigured, as it were, into the nostalgic and glorious vision of home. Conversely, the unending destitution of the orang laut is not visually ‘tampered’ with. What is glaringly and unmistakably obvious to the narrator’s eye, the squalid and dismal lot of the sea gypsies, is glossed over and remains mentally ‘unseen’ to Whalley. The careful attention paid towards describing the sea gypsies’ abode and wretched existence makes the relevant passage worth quoting in its entirety: A few miserable, half-naked families, a sort of outcast tribe of longhaired, lean, and wild-eyed people, strove for their living in this lonely wilderness of islets, lying like an abandoned outwork of the land at the gates of the bay. Within the knots and loops of the rocks the water rested more transparent than crystal under their crooked and leaky canoes, scooped out of the trunk of a tree: ... Their bodies stalked brown and emaciated as if dried up in the sunshine; their lives ran out silently; the homes where they were born, went to rest, and died – flimsy shed of rushes and coarse grass eked out with a few ragged mats – were hidden out of sight from the open sea. No glow of their household fires ever kindled for a seaman a red spark upon the blind night of the group: ... the unbreathing, concentrated calms like the deep introspection of a passionate nature, brooded awfully for days and weeks together over the unchangeable inheritance


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of their children; till at last the stones, hot like live embers, scorched the naked sole, till the water clung warm, and sickly, and as if thickened about the legs of lean men with girded loins, wading thighdeep in the pale blaze of the shallows. ... The taciturn fishermen within the reefs would extend their lean arms toward the offing; and the brown figures stooping on the tiny beaches, the brown figures of men, women, and children grubbing in the sand in search of turtles’ eggs, would rise up, crooked elbow aloft and hand over the eyes, to watch this monthly apparition glide straight on, swerve on – and go by. (Y 244) True to the notion that what is obvious can become hidden to the eye, the makeshift homes of the destitute natives, ‘flimsy sheds of rushes and coarse grass eked out with a few ragged mats’, are symbolically ‘hidden out of sight from the open sea’ (Y 244). As eyewitness then, Whalley’s testimony is called into question. In Lord Jim, a similar portrait of the orang laut and their habitat is presented as Marlow recollects the details of his last afternoon with Jim: A chain of islands sat broken and massive facing the wide estuary, displayed in a sheet of pale glassy water reflecting faithfully the contour of the shore. ... A ragged, sooty bunch of flimsy mat hovels was perched over its own inverted image upon a crooked multitude of high piles the colour of ebony. A tiny black canoe put off from amongst them with two tiny men, all black, who toiled exceedingly, striking down at the pale water: and the canoe seemed to slide painfully on a mirror. The bunch of miserable hovels was the fishing village that boasted of the white lord’s especial protection, and the two men crossing over were the old headman and his son-in-law. They landed and walked up to us on the white sand, lean, dark-brown as if dried in smoke, with ashy patches on the skin of their naked shoulders and breasts. Their heads were bound in dirty but carefully folded handkerchiefs, and the old man began at once to state a complaint, voluble, stretching a lank arm, screwing up at Jim his old bleared eyes confidently. The Rajah’s people would not leave them alone; there had been some trouble about a lot of turtles’ eggs his people had collected on the islets there – and leaning at arm’s-length upon his paddle, he pointed with a brown skinny hand over the sea. ... The two half-naked fishermen had arisen as soon as I had gone; they were no doubt pouring the plaint of their trifling, miserable, oppressed lives into the ears of the white lord, and no doubt he was

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listening to it, making it his own, ... Their dark-skinned bodies vanished on the dark background long before I had lost sight of their protector. (LJ 332–3, 336) Unlike Whalley, whose sense of an Eastern ‘reality’ is constructed upon an ideal and a blind faith in the benefits of the colonial correction wrought ‘by superior intelligence, by superior knowledge, by superior force’ (Y 289), Jim is only too aware of the oppression suffered by the orang laut under his protection. He ‘[makes] it his own’, even willing to risk imbibing Tunku Allang’s poisoned coffee and ‘make no end of fuss over these rotten turtles’ eggs’ (LJ 334). Perhaps like his rescuer Marlow, he is afflicted with ‘[a] confounded democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blindness’; however, unlike Marlow, whose democratic vision ‘has been of no advantage to [him]’ (LJ 94), Jim’s vision of those under his protection has been of overwhelming advantage to him. As a ‘gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision’ (LJ 96), it can be safely said that he had grasped the opportunity which had ‘sat veiled by his side like an Eastern bride waiting to be uncovered by the hand of the master’ (LJ 243–4). For Whalley, who counts ‘big carbon photographs’ (Y 172) of his family as among his indispensable life’s belongings, his recollected image of the East is as ‘true’ to him as a photographic image might be true to his eyes: ‘In this evocation, swift and full of detail like a flash of magnesium light into the niches of a dark memorial hall, Captain Whalley contemplated things once important, ... and they gave him for a moment such an almost physical grip upon time’ (Y 195). Magnesium light alludes to photography. Elsewhere, in The Shadow-Line, a photograph offers undeniable proof of the late, fiddle-playing captain’s unlikely love affair: ‘positive evidence of it existed in the shape of a photograph’ (TSL 97). However, as suggested earlier, photographic evidence is itself subjective. In his insightful discussion of Conrad and visual entertainment, Stephen Donovan analyses the writer’s use of the life review in ‘Typhoon’ and The Secret Agent. The life review is a visual mode whereby one sees one’s life flashing instantaneously before one’s eyes. Donovan compares the life review that Jukes experiences on board the stormtossed Nan-Shan with that of Whalley: like the tell-tale allusion to photography in Captain Whalley’s ‘sudden evocation’ of the past in ‘The End of the Tether’, ‘swift and full of detail like a flash of magnesium light into the niches of a dark memorial hall’ (Y 195), Conrad here encourages a readerly scepticism


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towards the truth value of the life review. (Donovan, 2005: 36, emphasis added) Donovan drives home the point that ‘Conrad uses this popular motif in order to stress, not the possibility of distilling a person’s life into a single narrative, but, rather, the inherent chaos and meaninglessness of such pictorial cascades’ (Donovan, 2005: 36–7). In a separate visual episode in ‘The End of the Tether’, the unscrupulous and ‘clear-eyed’ (Y 272) engineer-owner of the Sofala, Mr. Massy, catches a glimpse of five digits in the form of a vision and believes the ‘truth value’ of this passing vision, regarding it as a ‘fortunate, rare hint’ (Y 314): ‘there appeared before his vision, unexpectedly and connected with no dream, a row of flaming and gigantic numbers – three nought seven one two – making up a number such as you may see on a lottery ticket’ (Y 313). Nevertheless, the experience leaves him ‘shivering nervously as if from some great shock’ (Y 314). Apart from the ironic implication of Massy’s superstitious belief in occult visions, the ‘inherent chaos and meaninglessness’ of the vision is suggested by the notion that the alarming, fiery vision is the distilled projection of Massy’s manic obsession with gambling. In Lord Jim, Marlow speaks of the illusions of a seafaring life and how a young seaman ‘[looks] with shining eyes upon that glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his own glances full of fire’ (LJ 129). Marlow recognizes that the visions of youth are pure illusion; the ‘truth value’ of these illusions is the sum of the seaman’s projected desires: ‘In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality – in no other is the beginning all illusion – the disenchantment more swift – the subjugation more complete’ (LJ 129). Unlike his fellow mariners, Whalley and Massy, Marlow can be said to have the benefit of hindsight since he recognizes the illusion for what it is. In ‘Youth’, a middle-aged Marlow ‘regards the East as in his youth, but the difference is that he is now aware that his youthful view is romantic’ (Goonetilleke, 1977: 36). In my discussion so far I have shown how, in ‘The End of the Tether’, vision is deconstructed as symbolized by Whalley’s progressive loss of vision. Ultimately, the East which is conjured by the contesting voices and visual surpluses of ‘history’ can only offer a passing, fleeting glimpse of the nineteenth-century Malay world, the final meaning of which remains elusive, doubtful, and open-ended. In any dialogue, there are loopholes and in the discursive ‘scramble’ for the Malay world, the loophole lies in visual subjectivity. Conrad’s task might have been ‘before all, to make [the reader] see’ (NB 20) but he did not then proceed to make the reader see things his way for ‘[e]veryone must walk in the

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light of his own heart’s gospel’ (CL 1: 253). Seeing is subject to manipulation and in Whalley’s case, irreversible deterioration. The cleaving of the Malay world into two imperial spheres of influence as provided for by the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 is perhaps a fitting emblem of the deep fault lines which characterize both historical and fictional representations of the region.

Conrad’s illusion: ‘a vain and floating appearance’ Just as the Eastern fiction abounds with references to vision, so too Conrad’s ambivalence shows itself in his writerly scepticism towards any form of vision, especially mediated vision: the world ‘whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is always but a vain and floating appearance’ (CL 2: 30). In the Malay tales, characters run the whole spectrum of human visuality: the one-eyed Babalatchi, the blind Omar and Whalley, ‘Red-Eyed Tom’ (TR 9) Lingard with the penetrating gaze, and the ‘sort of scribe to the wretched little Rajah’ with his ‘poor purblind eyes’ (LJ 280). Monocular, binocular, or non-ocular (i.e. blind) vision notwithstanding, the point is that every visionary novelist must create a world ‘in which he can honestly believe’. At ‘the heart of fiction, ... some sort of truth can be found’ (NLL 6). Central to his poetic doctrine is Conrad’s insistence on truth, which is not truth per se but the image of truth: ‘words should be handled with care lest the picture, the image of truth abiding in facts, should become distorted – or blurred’ (CL 2: 200, emphasis added). I suggest that in cautioning Clifford about the careful handling of words, Conrad is really referring to the grand illusion of the Malay world that both he and Clifford were attempting to conjure and in which ‘facts’ were used to evoke a ‘proper atmosphere of actuality’ (NB 129–30). In sum, Conrad is the illusionist par excellence. It was Edward Garnett (1868–1937), Conrad’s literary confidant and adviser, who had commented on Conrad’s ‘power of making us see a constant succession of changing pictures’ and how he ‘deals in perpetual illusions, perpetual appearances, dreams and shifting phantasies,’ and how he ‘creates dissolving worlds, fading mirages out of the stuff men call reality’ (Sherry, 1973: 107–8, emphasis in original). Garnett might be describing a magician here and indeed the masters of photography, cinema and other optical wizardry were regarded as such. When Conrad wrote to Richard Curle of ‘the utter insignificance of explicit statement and also its power to call attention away from things that matter in the region of art’ (CL 7: 457) and when he mused over


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‘the curse of facts and the blessing of illusions’ (NB 5) in his note to Almayer’s Folly, he was prophesying the gradual death of aesthetic illusion. Writing at the turn into the twentieth century, he was also prolonging the visual tradition of his times which had privileged the perceiver over the perceived and which had thrived on illusion. The ‘things that matter in the region of art’ are precisely the things which are inexact, intangible, undefined, inscrutable, obscure, inexplicable, not-quite-real, romantic, illusory: ‘All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality’ (NLL 13). The artist’s sacred task is to describe the vague ‘unseen’, the ‘image of truth’, the ‘illusion’ and certainly not to create reality’s perfect double. Mankind was a hapless victim of its own condition, shackled to ‘the most insignificant tides of reality’, and in need of ‘edification’ and relief via ‘illusion’. In an industrialized world of increasingly mass-manufactured and serially produced merchandise, the serious artist and his public had all the more reason to seek refuge in the sanctuary of the image and its power of illusion, its ‘magic suggestiveness’ (NB 19). As we have seen, although Conrad insisted that his vision/illusion was true, the texts unfailingly present this vision as ‘a vain and floating appearance’. Symbolically, Marlow cannot help feeling the world slowly drift into oblivion as he listens to Jim speak about his incredible new life in Patusan: I don’t know why, listening to him, I should have noted so distinctly the gradual darkening of the river, of the air; the irresistible slow work of the night settling silently on all the visible forms, effacing the outlines, burying the shapes deeper and deeper, like a steady fall of impalpable black dust. (LJ 306) In the tales, twilight dominates and the ebbing daylight serves to heighten the illusory aspect of the East. Marlow’s vision of Jim and his world as he departs from Patusan suggests a transient vision which appears to self-erode despite the white clarity of its principal character: He was white from head to foot, and remained persistently visible with the stronghold of the night at his back, the sea at his feet, the opportunity by his side – still veiled. What do you say? Was it still veiled? I don’t know. For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea


seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child – then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world. ... And, suddenly, I lost him. ... (LJ 336) Like the opportunity which ‘like an Eastern bride’ had come to his side, the story of Jim himself is ‘veiled’ (LJ 416). Marlow confesses that his sense of reality is tenuous at best and that perhaps this makes him desire to tell Jim’s story, ‘to try to hand over ... , as it were, its very existence, its reality – the truth disclosed in a moment of illusion’ (LJ 323). If not told, the story may be lost forever. Jim himself is characterized by ‘floating outlines’ (LJ 224) and Marlow describes Jim’s world as ‘one of the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth’ and that he, Marlow, ‘had looked under its obscure surface’ (LJ 323). The persistence of Jim’s visibility is also an allusion to retinal afterimage, the phenomenon whereby the presence of a visual sensation or image persists even though the stimulus is absent and which forms the basis of ‘moving’ pictures in devices such as the zoetrope. Persistence of vision in Jim’s case can suggest that Marlow’s narrative is itself an ‘optical toy’ producing images which are ‘too phantasmal and extravagant’ and yet true (LJ 174). The ‘obscure surface’ mentioned by Marlow points to the figural blankness we encounter in Conrad’s Malay world, a world devoid of visual signs or one in which signs are effortlessly constructed and just as easily dismantled. We are also reminded of Conrad’s own belief that fiction-making is not the invention of depths but that of surfaces because ‘[m]ost things and most natures have nothing but a surface’ (CL 2: 22). To be sure, surfaces are all that the human eye can ever perceive. It is a singular flaw of vision that it cannot comprehend the thing itself; all it can record are the superficial and immediately apparent impressions: a subjective materiality that Conrad’s Eastern vision demonstrates fully and profoundly. Michael Fried has argued that Conrad’s impressionist project is ‘grounded in the writer’s relation to the act of writing’, a relation which he calls ‘erasure’ (Fried, 1990: 211). He illustrates how in Almayer’s Folly and throughout Conrad’s oeuvre, erasure (dramatized and thematized, e.g. by the disfigurement of the drowned man’s face and the veiling of the corpse by Mrs Almayer) as a representational act produces blankness which in turn is a particular representation in its own right. A problematic of erasure and blankness in ‘Youth’ for instance is expressed allegorically in ‘the obliteration of the Judea’s name and device just before it sank’,


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in ‘the cursing voice and the silent gazes’, in ‘the image of the sleeping Mahon’s upturned face with his white beard spread out on his breast; but its most powerful manifestation lies in the suggestion that the youthful Marlow was himself a blank page’ (Fried, 1990: 235). Fried expands on the idea of Marlow, the blank page, being the chief visualizer of the Eastern scene before him and the colonial implications of this position: And this suggests in turn that one of imperialism’s fundamental mobilizing strategies was to encourage its younger representatives to imagine, for all their prior formation in European society and the actual economic work they were carrying out, that they were engaged in a strictly personal enterprise of self-realization that cast them in the passive role of blank surfaces on which their experiences of the East (or Africa, or South America) would inscribe the first identitydefining marks. Conrad’s singular achievement in ‘Youth’ was, through the medium of erasure, simultaneously to bear eloquent witness to the success of that strategy and to allow the reader to glimpse its merely strategic face. (Fried, 1990: 235–6) If Marlow’s success at constructing that Eastern vision and at selfrealization depends on a strategic blankness or emptiness, then this vision is purely subjective in the sense of ‘[beginning] and [ending] in [himself]’ (NB 37). In the following section, I will re-visit the muchexamined visions of ‘Youth’.

Conrad’s tableaux and magic lantern exhibition In Conrad’s East, the gaze is reciprocated: the seen is also the seer. Natives are also assigned the task of observing and summing up the objects of their gaze: ‘And then I saw the men of the East – they were looking at me. ... I saw [the East] looking at me’ (Y 40). By overlapping two fields of vision, his own and that of the natives, Marlow deftly insinuates himself within the same visual frame. Thus Marlow, in his halcyon, rose-tinted youth is himself very much an integral part of his Eastern vision. Nevertheless, what is often overlooked is how for the native spectators, the scene that greets their eyes is nothing short of unearthly and bloodcurdling. In ‘Youth’, the counter-gaze takes in what must be by any reckoning a chilling view for the native spectator: They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. ... the three boats with the tired men

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from the West sleeping, unconscious of the land and the people and of the violence of sunshine. They slept thrown across the thwarts, curled on bottom-boards, in the careless attitudes of death. The head of the old skipper, leaning back in the stern of the long-boat, had fallen on his breast, and he looked as though he would never wake. Farther out old Mahon’s face was upturned to the sky, with the long white beard spread out on his breast, as though he had been shot where he sat at the tiller; and a man, all in a heap in the bows of the boat, slept with both arms embracing the stem-head and with his cheek laid on the gunwale. The East looked at them without a sound. (Y 41) The petrifaction of the Eastern crowd is reflected in the immobilized physical landscape itself: ‘Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred ... the big leaves ... hung shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal’ (Y 41). The young Marlow’s vision of the East, highly romanticized, idealized, and infused with the nostalgia of a maiden voyage East, seems to condense an entire career on Eastern waters into a single image: ‘But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth’ (Y 42). Two ironic strands can be teased from the passage above. First, for the multi-cultural ‘brown, bronze, yellow faces’ of the East, the arrival of the boat with corpse-like strangers in it can only be an ominous sign. The transfixed crowd is reminiscent of the colonized multitudes which are portrayed in Conrad’s fiction as simultaneously mystified and awed by the inexplicable actions and ‘incomprehensible purposes’ (Y 224) of the Tuan Putih. This irony is multiplied by the fact that it is this fascination and belief in European superiority (their ‘wisdom’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘strength’ [Y 42]) that has been exploited to good effect by the British so that the gaze of the Eastern crowd is finally devoid of any empowering aspect even as it holds up a mirror to the civilized West and its questionable intentions. The second ironic strand lies in Marlow’s vision itself. There is everything to suggest that the East he remembers is consciously one of his own making. Tableaux as a form of visual entertainment were a popular amusement in Conrad’s England. Human actors pose against a constructed backdrop to reproduce paintings and other picturesque scenes. In ‘Youth’, there is a very strong sense that Marlow’s preconceived Oriental fantasy is enacted by a pre-arranged cast on a pre-constructed stage, as it were. He repeats that ‘now I see it always’ (Y 37) and ‘I see it now’ (Y 41), and as he sees and reminisces,


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the motionless scene materializes and unfolds before him in perfect synchronicity as it were: And then I saw the men of the East – they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. ... This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and sombre, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise. And these were the men. I sat up suddenly. A wave of movement passed through the crowd from end to end, passed along the heads, swayed the bodies, ran along the jetty like a ripple on the water, like a breath of wind on a field – and all was still again. I see it now – the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour – the water reflecting it all, the curve of the shore, the jetty, the highsterned outlandish craft floating still ... (Y 41) In other words, the spectacle before his eyes, its immobility as well as muted motion, is adapted to conform to his idea of the East; the East of his boyish dreams where exotic place names like ‘Bankok’ was a ‘Magic name, blessed name’ (Y 15). D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke notes that the naïve Marlow ‘responds to the East in reality in the same conventional way he did in his imaginative fantasy. By using the same kind of [romantic] language, Conrad implies that Marlow is too young to profit from his experience of the East’ (Goonetilleke, 1977: 35). The East of Marlow’s poetic imaginings, ‘the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and sombre’ (Y 41) is organized as a tableau and as orchestrated tableau, the truth of his vision is as contrived, fantastical, ‘vain and floating’ as the images projected in a magic lantern or phantasmagoric show. Collits suggests that ‘[c]harged with sensuous desire’, the above passage from ‘Youth’ ‘embodies a major component of the orientalist division of East from West’ and ‘links Conrad’s early writing with the still potent Romantic conception of the exotic East’ (Collits, 2005: 55). Be that as it may, this division is rendered ambivalent when one considers how for the coloured and colourful crowd on the jetty, the West was also a tableau of staged exotic ‘fascination’: ‘impalpable and enslaving, like a charm’. Indeed, in the communication to Curle mentioned above, Conrad had stated that in ‘Youth’, ‘East or West are of

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no importance whatever, [he] kept the name of the port of landing out of the record of “poeticised” sensations’ (CL 7: 457). The record of ‘poeticised sensations’ is augmented further by the ‘sweep of the bay’ and the ‘curve of the shore’ which suggest a stage fit for a dramatic performance or a ‘gorgeous spectacle’ (TU 7) as in ‘Karain: A Memory’, where a similar stage exists: the bay ‘like a bottomless pit of intense light’, the ‘circular sheet of water reflected a luminous sky, and the shores enclosing it made an opaque ring of earth floating in an emptiness of transparent blue’ (TU 5). In Almayer’s Folly, the heart-wrenching aria from Verdi’s Il Trovatore emanating from the hand-organ is not incongruous in a floodlit setting which seems fitting enough for operas of heightened emotions and plangent pathos. In line with the theme of youth, its ‘romance of illusions’ (Y 42) and the glamour of illusions, Marlow’s narrative centres on a range of experiences compressed into a concentrated moment: ‘Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour – of youth! ... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and – good-bye’ (Y 42)! The preoccupation with ‘flick[s] of sunshine’ or flashbacks is characteristic of Conrad’s writing method which allows him to lock in a lengthy narrative description ‘into one suggestive view of a whole phase of life’ (CL 2: 418). The frame-narrator of ‘Youth’ concludes by reiterating the sense of a lost youth which ‘has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash’ (Y 42). Donovan notes: ‘Conrad repeatedly compared successful literary narrative to visual experiences that, far from being straightforwardly revelatory or “graphic”, were fleeting, difficult and even non-rational’ (Donovan, 2005: 20). He quotes Conrad’s letter to Garnett where he had praised Garnett’s gift of the ‘mot juste’, of those sentences that are like a flash of limelight on the façade of a cathedral or a flash of lightning on a landscape when the whole scene and all the details leap up before the eye in a moment and are irresistibly impressed on memory by their sudden vividness. (CL 1: 198) Perhaps the naming of Lingard’s brigs Flash and Lightning alludes symbolically to this technique. I propose that it is the fleetingness, difficulty, and non-rationality of visual experiences that best typify Conrad’s Eastern vision and that he had sought to devise a means to duplicate that sensation in his prose. Not unlike the life review, visual and narrative flicks and flashes connote meaning which is fundamentally fragmented and impossible to piece together: glimpses, glimmers, and shades


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rather than the picture in its coherent entirety. In his narrative, Marlow dwells on that Eastern vision captured in a flash as it were as he explains, ‘It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it’ (Y 42, emphasis added). Marlow also declares: I have known its fascination since; I have seen the mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of brown nations, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. (Y 41–2, emphasis added) The containment of the Eastern vision captured in that instance as well as the power and memory of that same vision seem to take precedence over experiences of actual contact and acquaintanceship with the East and its culture. Goonetilleke states that as Marlow matures and ‘acquires a realistic, ironic sense of the inability of some “superior” members of the “ruling race” to cope with living in the conquered, developing East ... . this sense is swamped by a persisting romanticism’ and that ‘what matters is Marlow’s reaction. The East is not important in its own right and is treated as a testing-ground for the mind of the European foreigner’ (Goonetilleke, 1977: 35–6). To this I might add that the East is treated as a testing ground for the visions of Marlow. In his ‘Author’s Note’, Conrad states: ‘Youth is a feat of memory. It is a record of experience; but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself’ (NB 37). It is possible to argue that this ‘feat of memory’ is a record of visual experience, a fleeting vision inevitably coloured by the illusions of youth, and that Conrad himself is the self-confessed origin and exhibitor of this vision. The array of ‘optical toys’ figuring sporadically throughout the Eastern stories also exhibits and parades illusory visions of obscure truths but ‘truth’ nonetheless in the sense of subjective truth. In the flashing seascapes of Conrad’s East, the ‘polished sea’ (TU 3) and other polished surfaces like the mahogany table in ‘Youth’ seem to reflect everything and spectators dominate the landscape. In Lord Jim, it is not Stein’s big mahogany table in the gloomy cave-like room which reflects the ‘spectral’ Jewel but the floor: ‘The waxed floor reflected her dimly as though it had been a sheet of frozen water’ (LJ 347). In The Shadow-Line, ‘[t]he mahogany table under the skylight shone in the twilight like a dark pool of water’ (TSL 82). In The Rescue, Lingard cautions, ‘this sea, if lonely, is not blind. Every island in it is an eye’ (TR 19).

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It is possible to figuratively compare Conrad’s Eastern setting with that of a phantasmagoria/magic lantern exhibition where lenses and mirrors are strategically and carefully arranged to project images, apparitions, and other spectral forms which dissolve, float, and disappear with disconcerting effect. With the tropical sun as the omnipresent source of light, images captured on polished tables, the plate-glass-like sea, and other reflecting surfaces function as picture slides which are then ‘regulated’ for the multitudes. In Lord Jim, Marlow describes a majestic full moon, ‘glowing ruddily’, ‘gliding upwards’, and ‘[floating] away’ after throwing the two hills of Patusan into ‘intensely black relief’ with its ‘diffused light’ (LJ 221); a ‘[w]onderful effect’, Jim remarks, and, ‘Worth seeing? Is it not?’, prompting Marlow to smile at Jim’s tone which seemed to say that ‘he had had a hand in regulating that unique spectacle’ (LJ 221). In Java, Stein’s abode lends itself to an atmospheric play of lights and mirrors: We passed through empty dark rooms, escorted by gleams from the lights Stein carried. They glided along the waxed floors, sweeping here and there over the polished surface of a table, leaped upon a fragmentary curve of a piece of furniture, or flashed perpendicularly in and out of distant mirrors, while the forms of two men and the flicker of two flames could be seen for a moment stealing silently across the depths of a crystalline void. (LJ 215–16)

The frame-spectator In Conrad’s Eastern tales, embedded spectacles call attention to the role of the spectator(s). Like the use of frame-narrative which ‘calls attention to the role of the reader by dramatizing the presence of the narratee and ‘the connection between the tale and its recipients, ... thus [emblematizing] the reciprocal relationship between the author and his readers’ (Knowles and Moore, 2000: 124), the use of frame-spectacle dramatizes the presence of the spectator. In Victory, two menials, one Colombian, the other Chinese, stand flanking/framing three white men Heyst, Ricardo, and Jones on the wharf of Samburan’s Black Diamond Bay: A silence fell on that group of three, as if every one had become afraid to speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis. Pedro on one side of them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful spectators. (V 241)


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In the East, the ‘impending crisis’ of greed, lust, and power, which mainly involves the white characters and their obscure motives, promises to be a spectacle from which ‘watchful spectators’ may derive visual entertainment. Jones and Ricardo’s sinister intrusion into the solitude of Heyst is certainly the stuff of dramatic suspense and psychological thrills just as Jim’s arrival at Doramin’s kampong after Waris’s death fills the native spectators with an almost palpable sense of anticipation and wonder. Jim is ‘watched by all’ (LJ 252) and the spectacle of a white man constantly surrounded by crowds of expectant and absorbed spectators (the ‘group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in the midst’ [LJ 379]) is viewed by the ‘outer’ spectators, the after-dinner listeners of Marlow’s tale. The outermost spectator in this multilayered visual event is of course the implied reader/spectator of the frame-narrator’s tale/vision. In Conrad’s East, acts of spying (like eavesdropping), prying, staring, gazing, and ogling function to underscore the visual politics of power and desire involved in the act. Ricardo is a spectator-voyeur, as he spies on Number One’s bungalow, eagerly awaiting a glimpse of Lena: ‘Yes, he could see all that there was to be seen, far and near. Excellent eyes’ (V 282)! Ricardo can hardly wait to catch a glimpse of Lena’s face since he is certain that he would be able to read her face. Nevertheless, in spite of ‘excellent eyes’, when the moment arrives, what transpires is a misreading, a flawed ‘vision’ with lethal consequences for Ricardo. In his presumptuousness, Ricardo fails to realize that human motives and inner emotional workings remain impenetrable and that visions can be falsified or constructed. The appearance of a dead body with its face completely disfigured afloat in the river in Almayer’s Folly provides another example of how the integrity of a spectacle’s visual content can be deliberately compromised. Mrs. Almayer’s little performance of veiling the corpse adds to the deceptive effect of the spectacle and the spectators are fooled into believing that the dead body is that of Dain Maroola. Conrad’s frame-spectators also have the effect of ‘telescoping’ the East and reducing it to a restrictive, enclosed field of vision. What’s left in the process is basically a fragment ‘as if seen in the small end of a telescope’ (LJ 54), which by no means constitutes the whole picture. In addition, the idea of mediated images suggests that the final visual outcome is likely to be an imperfect representation of reality, given the distortions and subjectivity of the medium. In Victory, Conrad’s East/Malay world is set up as a telescopic ‘magic circle’ (V 7) within which illusionists perform their optical tricks. By the same token, the images produced within this circle may also prove to be ‘too phantasmal’ (LJ 174).

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In Conrad’s East, frame-spectators tend to comprise characters whose ocular idiosyncrasies (dimmed eyes, staring eyes, purblind eyes, excellent eyes, red eyes, penetrating eyes, shining eyes, etc.) are deliberate and ironic metonyms for the dubious ‘truths’ of their observations. Comprising both white and brown humanity, frame-spectators often bear witness to surreal, spectral, disturbing, and enchanting visions in Conrad’s East. In all these, the writer Conrad, the projector of visions, seeks to entertain the reader, the ‘watchful [spectator]’ (V 241). Indeed, as Donovan notes: ‘Conrad’s novels themselves succeeded in “showing” Borneo ... to an audience habituated to visual entertainments’ (Donovan, 2005: 24). The connection between the spectacle and its viewers emblematizes the relationship between the writer and the reader, a reciprocal relationship wherein the displayer of visions depends on the spectators’ subjective vision to create the desired effects: ‘one writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader’ (CL 1: 370). Just as the use of frame-narrators distances Conrad from his narrators, foregrounds the telling of the tale rather than the tale itself, and demonstrates the inadequacy of words (‘the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage’ [NB 19]) and ‘facts’ to represent the ‘truth’, so too the use of frame-spectators distances Conrad from his Eastern vision, foregrounds the process of ‘regulating’ (LJ 221) the Eastern spectacle rather than the thing itself, and shows the inadequacy of visual apparatuses (the popular optical devices and the lens of fiction) to represent the ‘truth’. In Lord Jim, Marlow reiterates to his listeners that his tale ‘gets dwarfed in the telling’ and that he ‘can’t with mere words convey to [them] the impression of [Jim’s] total and utter isolation’ (LJ 272). In ‘Heart of Darkness’, a similar grievance is voiced: ‘it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence’ (Y 82). It is possible to argue that in the telling/ depiction of the Malay world’s truth, history and fiction take turns at being outer and inner narratives/visions and that the interaction between the two exemplifies the difficulty in conveying this truth. In the earlier chapters, we explored how the intricate interface between the ‘facts’ and the literary imagination produces a complex picture, a ‘presented vision’ and ‘visible world’ (NB 20, 21) of multiple perspectives and facets. In this chapter, I’ve shown how this presented vision is subjective and insubstantial and that visual truth is evanescent, vaporous, and constantly shifting. Significantly, if Marlow’s Jim ‘remained persistently visible’ (LJ 336), it was also ‘impossible to see him clearly’ (LJ 339). Marlow’s narrative works to subvert any sense of visual


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certainty just as Conrad’s narrative strategies work to the same end. Notably, to his ‘privileged’ (LJ 337) reader, Marlow pronounces: ‘I affirm nothing’ (LJ 339). It can be argued that in creating his fictional Malay world, Conrad also ‘affirms nothing’. In light of the subjectivity of vision, his remark, ‘Any criticism that would look for real description of places and events would be disastrous to that particle of the universe, which is nobody and nothing in the world but myself’ (CL 1: 186; emphasis added), takes on a whole new complexion. For Conrad, meaning is perpetually out of reach and this elusive truth is expressed in Marlow’s appraisal of his own narrative of Jim: ‘And besides, the last word is not said, – probably shall never be said’ (LJ 225).

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In truth every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can honestly believe. (NLL 6) The creation of a world, as Conrad himself puts it, is ‘not a small undertaking’ (NLL 6), not least because this world ‘must resemble something already familiar’ to the reader. In the scramble to represent the East for the crowds of readers back home, Conrad joins the ranks of colonial administrators like Hugh Clifford and Frank Swettenham, who also wrote versions of the ‘Malay’ and the Malay world. Indeed, the fact that acknowledged authorities like Clifford reviewed his works seems to suggest that the artist’s voice was drawing the attention, if not the approval, of the upper crust of colonial ranks, the named or unnamed ‘attentive Excellenc[ies]’ (V 408) out in the East watching over their subordinates and charges. Conrad had also reviewed Clifford’s books only to pronounce his works ‘not literature’ (CL 2:57) even as people had begun to sit up, including Clifford himself (despite his nit-picking of Conrad’s little ‘inaccuracies’ of representation), to listen to Conrad’s voice. Conrad’s genius is such that he drew considerable mileage from the little that he knew. The rest, he left to his artistic imagination, for he did not subscribe to knowledge as an end in itself but rather as a means to an end. Nevertheless, Conrad’s fiction is far from being monologic; in it, echoes of historical facts and truths as constructed by both West and East are discernible. Conrad’s acknowledgement of the contest between history and art is itself a tacit recognition that both languages of truth engage in dialogue to produce his imaginary East: a world which is informed of history even as it simultaneously resists history. Indeed, his Eastern vision and that of others do not constitute the last word; ‘truth unadorned’ (NLL 60) or otherwise, the truth of the 188

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East is elusive and typically characterized by heteroglossia or to borrow Conrad’s metaphor, ‘rescued fragment(s)’ of a ‘passing phase of life’ (NB 20). Conrad’s fiction as a ‘rescued fragment’ (made up of many other ‘fragments’) and its surplus of vision contribute to this complex Eastern picture. Furthermore, Conrad’s Eastern vision is founded on a visual loophole. Vision as surplus is a loophole in the art-history dialogue, since the eye is a peculiar organ with peculiar characteristics and is not a reliable viewing instrument, as it were. Conrad viewed the optical devices of his times with distrust and cynicism; their function was to entertain by exploiting the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the human eye. The Victorian obsession with optical illusions posed both a challenge and an advantage to the novelist Conrad. The visual trope that Conrad deploys throughout his Eastern tales serves a dual purpose: it establishes the visual truth of what is seen even as it emphasizes the eye’s ability to distort the picture. The sum effect of this technique allows us to see that Conrad’s vision of the East is akin to an illusion captured within a figural ‘magic circle’ (V 7; TR 285; OI 157), a hallucinated mirage, no more nor less. Nevertheless, by invoking the prevailing visual culture of his times, Conrad infuses his illusion with the aura and status of truth, albeit his particular truth. Finally, in Conrad’s Eastern tales, history provides a context for literature, and literature provides a context for history. The tales are ultimately dramatic re-enactments of the intersection between history and art, performed with such remarkable conviction and stunning craftsmanship that it becomes difficult to tell the difference between the two. ‘Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing’ (NLL 17). By way of a parting thought, it might be worthwhile to reflect briefly on Conrad’s attitude to peoples whichever sphere they may come from, East or West, and the bonds between them. Conrad’s European characters hail from states which were once autocracies not unlike those found in the precolonial Malay world before European intervention. Conrad seems to be of the view that absolute monarchies were only the first necessary step towards political liberty and nationhood. Nations should then group themselves into politically unified, regional units. As far back as 1905 and thinking far ahead of his times, he had envisioned a unified European civilization (manifested today in the European Union): In Europe the old monarchical principle stands justified in its historical struggle with the growth of political liberty by the evolution of the idea of nationality as we see it concreted at the present time;

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by the inception of that wider solidarity grouping together around the standard of monarchical power these larger agglomerations of mankind. This service of unification, creating close-knit communities possessing the ability, the will, and the power to pursue a common ideal, has prepared the ground for the advent of a still larger understanding: for the solidarity of Europeanism, which must be the next step towards the advent of Concord and Justice; an advent that, however delayed by the fatal worship of force and the errors of national selfishness, has been, and remains, the only possible goal of our progress. (‘Autocracy and War’, NLL 96–7) Zdzisław Najder has discussed Conrad’s multiculturalism and his idea of a borderless ‘Europeanism’: Conrad’s idea of Europe, in which there will be ‘no frontiers’, can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth-century contemporaries and comrades-in-arms of Stein (the butterfly collector of Lord Jim), leaders of the Young Europe movement, ... While arguing for the necessity of a European ‘concord’, Conrad also considered ‘the national spirit’ to be the most reliable element in international politics. (Najder, 1997: 169) For Najder, Conrad was the quintessential European writer and ‘today, if the European Union were to award literary prizes, Joseph Conrad would be a perfect candidate’ (Najder, 1997: 175). This Pan-European ethos and solidarity (from which Conrad would rigorously exclude Russia and its Pan-Slavonic imperialism) was the socio-political and cultural ideal that Conrad had envisioned for his Europe. While in the East, he must have been intrigued by the Malay world’s Pan-Malayo-Muslim ethos and its invisible universalism. Perhaps he had even imagined ‘larger agglomerations of mankind’ (NLL 97) justified in the notion that ‘there is a bond between us and that humanity so far away’ (NB 4). As we have seen, colonial masters like Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles had bought into the idea of the globalized Malay world. The question we are confronted with now is: in a purely idealistic sense, did Conrad envisage colonial expansion in the East as a means of achieving ‘larger agglomerations of mankind’ or perhaps a British ‘commonwealth’ of nations? In the ‘Author’s Note’ to Almayer’s Folly, he had professed solidarity with brown humanity: I am content to sympathize with common mortals, no matter where they live; in houses or in tents, in the streets under a fog, or in the forests behind the dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast

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solitude of the sea. For, their land – like ours – lies under the inscrutable eyes of the Most High. Their hearts – like ours – must endure the load of the gifts from Heaven: the curse of facts and the blessing of illusions, the bitterness of our wisdom and the deceptive consolation of our folly. (NB 4–5) In the all-important ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, universal solidarity is a major theme: the writer’s task is to ‘awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world’ (NB 20–1). Certainly, if all mankind is united in mythology (‘mysterious origin’) and common experiences, then it matters not whether Nina should revert to Malay savagery or assert her European culture: ‘It seemed to Nina that there was no change and no difference’ (AF 38). However, the fact that a choice was made confirms that ‘solidarity’ remains an ideal and even utopian abstraction, perhaps especially for Conrad himself. Indeed, as Conrad himself wryly implies in his Eastern tales, the colonial state was too fraught with manufactured racial divisions and the obsession with racial or national purity to allow for solidarity in the true sense of the word.

Map

Map: The Malay Archipelago

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Chronology 1511

1571 1619 1641 1669

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1868 1869

The Portuguese invade and take Malacca; Sultan Mahmud Syah flees to the south and sets up his new capital in Bentan in the Riau-Lingga archipelago. The Spanish occupy the Philippines and found Manila. The Dutch found Batavia. The Dutch conquer Malacca. The Dutch conquer Macassar; from this time, country traders from Portugal, Britain, and Denmark could no longer deal in Macassarese contraband. Displaced Portuguese factors and merchants relocated in Timor, and the British and Danes fled to Bantam only to be expelled from it in due course. Sultan Mahmud Syah of Johor-Riau is murdered by his nobles; this act of treason marks the turning point in Malay world politics undermining as it does the special relationship between a Malay ruler and his subjects which is founded on the idea of total obedience, unquestioning allegiance, and the supernatural powers attributed to the ruler. The Bugis influence in the Malay world is sealed with Bugis control over several peninsular Malay states and the kingdom of Johor-Riau. Francis Light, a country trader, takes possession of Penang in the name of King George III. Napoleon conquers the Netherlands and Britain takes over Dutch possessions in the Malay Archipelago to prevent them falling into French hands. Britain returns Malacca and other Dutch territories to the Netherlands. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles establishes Singapore as Britain’s main entrepôt city in the Straits to rival Batavia. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty partitions the Malay Archipelago into two spheres of influence; the Malay world is divided down the Straits of Malacca where the British would confine their activities to the Malay Peninsula or north of the line and the Dutch would control Sumatra, Java, and islands south of Singapore. The formation of the Straits Settlements comprising Singapore, Malacca, Penang, and Province Wellesley consolidates British presence in the Malay world. The British Empire abolishes slavery. The Sultan of Brunei cedes Sarawak to James Brooke, who subsequently becomes Rajah of Sarawak. With the help of Her Majesty’s Navy, Brooke launches a major attack on pirate strongholds along the Saribas, Sekrang, and Rejang rivers in Sarawak. Alfred Russel Wallace arrives in the Malay Archipelago. James Brooke dies in England. Britain includes north Borneo under its sphere of influence. The Suez Canal opens. 193

194 1873 1874

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1885 1886 1887

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Chronology Aceh wages war with the Dutch. The Pangkor Treaty is signed between Britain and the Malay state of Perak. In return for help in a succession dispute, and for recognition as the Sultan, Raja Abdullah invites the British Governor, Andrew Clarke, to send a Resident to Perak. British involvement in the peninsular Malay states begins to spread. The ‘forward movement’ of colonial expansion begins to gain momentum. As more Malay states come under British control, Residents are appointed to be the ‘indirect rulers’ of these states. Conrad sets eyes for the first time on the Far East after the vessel Palestine, on which he is serving as second mate, catches fire near Muntok and the crew is forced to abandon ship. Conrad sails for Singapore on board the Tilkhurst. Conrad becomes a naturalized British subject and obtains his master mariner’s certificate. Conrad sails on the Highland Forest to Samarang, Java, during which he sustains a sailing injury; he leaves Java for Singapore and, after recovering in hospital, signs up as mate on the steamship Vidar. On this Arabowned steamer, Conrad sails to west Borneo and Celebes. Conrad is appointed captain of the Otago and sails from Bangkok to Singapore and Sydney. He leaves the Malay Archipelago for the last time. The Federated Malay States is formed to increase administrative efficiency and rectify economic imbalance among the Malay states. The Netherlands East Indies proclaims the Ethical Policy. The Dutch declare Aceh conquered. Bali falls into Dutch hands as the last Balinese rulers fight to the death. Budi Utomo is proclaimed as first official nationalist movement.

Glossary adat: tradition; custom; source of customary law alam Melayu: Malay world/universe bangsa: this is rather difficult to translate given its wide distribution of meaning in early modern Malay history; in the classical texts, it has a narrower definition of ‘descent’ or ‘lineage’; contemporary equivalent of ‘nation’ or ‘people’ Bendahara: a palace minister with duties akin to those of a prime minister Daeng: a Bugis title of nobility (rendered ‘Dain’ by Conrad) haji: a returned Muslim pilgrim who has just completed the Haj (the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the five pillars of Islam) hikayat: history, chronicle, epic jihad: holy struggle by which the faith is spread through force of arms; in the earlier centuries in Southeast Asia, a rallying cry among Muslims to unite them in their battle against Christian Europeans; it can refer to any holy cause Karaeng: a Makassarese title granted to high-ranking nobles (Conrad’s ‘Karain’) kerajaan: kingdom, the condition of having a raja; in contemporary usage, ‘government’ kongsi: brotherhood; company lanun: Malay for ‘pirate’, ‘sea robber’; originating from ‘Illanun’, a seafaring tribe from the Sulu-Mindanao region previously widely feared for their piratical campaigns masuk Melayu: literally, ‘enter Malaydom’; ‘become Malay’; assimilate into the Malay community and civilization; adopt the culture, language, and religion of Malays mufti, sheikh al-ulama, sheikh al-Islam: high-ranking Muslim clerics with top religious positions within the Malay polity negara: approximately, ‘country’, ‘state’ Nusantara: vast archipelago sprawling between Sumatra and New Guinea (some definitions encompass an even wider area); nusa means ‘island’ or ‘place’ and antara ‘in between’; geopolitical expression for the pan-Malay world orang asli: aboriginals, proto-Malays orang kaya besar: an honorific or a title used for a grandee, a palace minister/ official, or a nobleman orang laut: literally, ‘sea people’; seafaring and riverine tribes many of whose descendents today live in the Riau-Lingga and Sulu archipelagos padri: Muslim radical group seeking to establish a stricter adherence to Islamic tenets in Minangkabau in the mid-nineteenth century; ‘padri’ is said to be derived from the Portuguese word for ‘priest’, that is, ‘padre’; its origin is also thought to be ‘Pedir’, a place-name in Sumatra Pangeran: in Brunei, a title for aristocrats; used in Java as well Pata: probably a corruption of ‘patih’, an honorific used for Javanese noblemen penghulu: village headman peranakan: local-born or locally born in the diaspora; for example, the Chinese Baba community in Malaysia and Singapore and their hybridized culture 195

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Glossary

which is the result of long-standing commingling with local Malays; the Chinese peranakan of Indonesia; the Jawi-Peranakan in Malaysia who are of Indian-Muslim (Malabar) and Malay descent raja/rajah: ruler, monarch rakyat: subjects, citizens Serani: Eurasian; (sing.)’Nasrani’, that is, ‘Nazarene’ sharia: Islamic laws syed/sharif: male descendant or kinsman of the prophet Mohammad tanah air: ‘land of water’; fatherland Tengku/Tunku: title for Malay princes ulama: Muslim scholar and teacher Yamtuan: Johor-Bugis title for the ruler; an abbreviation of ‘Yang diPertuan’, ‘he who is made Lord’; in present-day Malaysia, the ruler is the ‘Yang diPertuan Agong’ (‘The Paramount He who is made Lord’ i.e. the Supreme Ruler)

Notes Introduction 1. For a detailed account of Conrad’s excursions to the Far East, see Sherry, 1972: 33–51. 2. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 had carved the Malay Archipelago into two parts or imperial ‘spheres of influence’ along the Straits of Malacca. The British sphere is to the north of the dividing line and the Dutch zone is to the south. Although real or imagined places like Berau, Patusan, Samburan, Makassar, and Pulau Tujuh (Seven Isles) fall within the Dutch sphere as demarcated in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, borders were ambiguous in the ‘outer islands’ where control was nominal and allegiance was pledged simply by the flying of Dutch flags and the utterance of verbal oaths of submission. As an embittered Almayer told off his Dutch visitors: ‘You have no grip on this country’ (AF 138). The battle for the east coast of Borneo is a case in point, historically as well as fictionally. 3. See Resink, 1968: 307–23. 4. Robert Hampson notes that ‘Clifford is in the tradition of the colonial administrator who is also an amateur scholar. Like Raffles and Brooke, he gathers information about Malaysia in order to make himself a more efficient colonist’ (Hampson, 2000: 27). For an excellent and insightful discussion of ‘the development of a textual tradition of “writing Malaysia” from Marsden to Brooke’, see Hampson, 2000: 26. 5. In his review of the story ‘Karain’, Hugh Clifford states that the piece ‘can only be called Malay in Mr. Conrad’s sense’ (Clifford, 1904: 849). 6. Bernard Vlekke offers an explanation of the word’s etymology: Its original meaning is ‘The other islands’ as seen from Java or Bali, hence it took the more general meaning of ‘the outside world’, or ‘abroad’. In this meaning it is used in fifteenth century Javanese texts. After having been re-introduced by the Dutch archaeologist Brandes, it was taken up by E.F. Douwes Dekker in the twenties of [the twentieth] century, to be used as an Indonesian name for the whole of the Indies, though wrongly, from the philologist’s point of view. (Vlekke, 1959: 400) 7. Throughout this book, spellings for place-names, titles, and concepts, may differ: for example, Malacca and Melaka, Rhio and Riau, sayyid and syed, and so on. Malacca or Melaka (the Malay spelling) refers to the historic port-city on the west coast of the Malay peninsula. Its strategic location along the Straits of Malacca (which served as a main waterway linking the western world with the far east) had contributed to its rise as a major trading centre for centuries. This same Malacca/Melaka also refers to the great Malay dynastic kingdom and empire founded by Parameswara, a prince from Sumatra, in the early fifteenth century. Upon his conversion to Islam, Melaka became the first Muslim empire in Southeast Asia. The empire thrived until the Portuguese invasion of 1511 which resulted in the forced relocation of 197

198

Notes

Melaka’s royal house. Melaka is arguably synonymous with Malays and Melaka-Malay often refers to the civilization and culture of the Malays which are considered to have attained their pinnacle during the reign of the Melakan sultans. 8. At this juncture, it is timely to say a few words about the peranakan Chinese societies in the Malay Archipelago. In the fifteenth century and perhaps even earlier, Chinese settlers had set up home on the Malay peninsula, including in Malacca. Intermarriage and interaction with local Malays (in the days when religious differences were not yet a serious obstacle to mixed marriages), coupled with cultural adaptability on the part of the Chinese, had created peranakan societies domiciled in the region long before the arrival of the British. A classic example would be the Baba community of Malacca (in the second half of the nineteenth century, third-generation Babas were already being born). In so far as the Babas have evolved a unique, hybridized way of life, merging both Chinese and Malay elements, and have adopted the Malay lingua franca (developing a patois called Baba Malay), they may be said to have entered Malaydom. In the British era, Babas were also drawn to the dominant power and identified themselves with the British. C.M. Turnbull writes about the Babas’ ‘counter pull of three different cultural loyalties’ (Turnbull, 1977: 105) and John Clammer describes them thus: ‘By descent Chinese, by culture Sino-Malay and by political allegiance British, their position is very uncertain’ (Clammer, 1979: i). Members of these communities, born in the British-ruled Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, were also known collectively as the Straits Chinese. The Straits Chinese, or Straits-born Chinese, are differentiated from later immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century and were known as sin keh or ‘newcomer’. Their contact with the European official and commercial class made them very powerful middlemen and business figures. P’ng Poh Seng writes that ‘In the heyday of Straits Chinese prestige and influence it was an advantage to be a Baba, and it is not far-fetched to assume that all Straits-born Chinese then liked to be known as Babas. As a result the terms Baba, Straits Chinese, and Straits-born Chinese came to be used synonymously’ (P’ng, 1969: 97–8). The British presence as new masters of the Straits probably had something to do with the emergence of their triple loyalty. Attracted to the new order and the opportunities offered, the Straits Chinese, like Conrad’s Jim-Eng, would lay claim to ‘whiteness’, moving back and forth with ease across ‘national’ borders and disrupting the writing of the British nation. This may be said to be the Straits Chinese’s attempt to enter the fold of the British! 9. The extent of cultural hybridization in the Malay world can also be seen in commerce and shipping. Take for example, the Sino-Javanese junks that dominated the waters in the precolonial era and the fact that even then the Chinese had assimilated into Javanese civilization, many of them even embracing Islam. Chinese commercial units of measurement such as kati and picul entered the Malay and Javanese trading culture, while dacing, the Malay/Javanese term for a measuring device, is from the Cantonese toh-ch’ing.

Notes 199 10. The Andayas observe that in the eighteenth century, [t]he very concept of what ‘Melayu’ signified had broadened far beyond the narrow definition of Melaka’s early days. The language and culture of the Riau-Johor court was still held up as a model, but ‘Malayness’ had grown to incorporate the whole range of regional variations from Patani to east Sumatra. ... transition to the changed political and economic environment of the nineteenth century required time, and it was one of the ironies of history that this is precisely what Western imperialism could least afford to give. (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 112) It can be said that this process of cultural expansion ended with Western colonization and the imposition of Western concepts of race and nation. In present-day Malaysia, the rhetoric of race is supplanted by that of ‘ethnicity’ with the creation of entities such as the Malaysian-Chinese and the Malaysian-Indian. Before Independence, non-Malay ethnic groups had struck an inter-ethnic bargain with the dominant ethnic Malays whereby citizenship might be given to descendants of immigrants in return for privileges for the traditional inhabitants. 11. Cynthia Chou, in her fieldwork amongst the indigenous people or orang asli of Riau (‘Rhio’ to the British, including Conrad), writes that her informants referred to the alam Melayu (Malay world) as a territory comprising ‘a network of genealogically related kingdoms, which are currently divided between five nation-states – namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Thailand. The Malay world thus transcends the boundaries of these nation-states’ (Chou, 1997: 148). 12. See McNair, 1972: 313–14.

1 The Collision of Indistinct Ideas 1. For a history of the white rajahs of Sarawak, see Payne, 1986, and Reece, 2004. 2. Dutch participation in the Malay world began with the VOC, the chartered mercantile company set up in 1602, just two years after the EIC. For a history of the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Boxer, 1979, 1988. There is a need to examine the origins of Kaspar Almayer, Peter Willems, Hudig, Vinck, Captain Heemskirk, and Colonel (rtd.) Van Wyk. All of these were either VOC servants or privateers who owed their existence in the East Indies to the fact that the Dutch had traversed these waters in search of cloves, nutmeg, and mace from the late sixteenth century onwards. The Dutch nation was perhaps not very high on Conrad’s PanEuropean preferred-nation list, along with the Prussians, Russians, and Germans. Glimpses of Dutch imperial rapacity and greed provide a foil to the influential English country traders in Conrad’s Malay tales. A measure of anti-Dutch sentiment is also traceable, displayed either explicitly by the characters themselves, or implicitly, by authorial intrusion. The owner of the schooner-yacht Hermit wants to expose the Dutch colonial system. Resink points out that the yacht is correctly bound for Batavia because ‘only on Java could the “Dutch colonial system” actually be studied’ (Resink, 1968: 309).

200 Notes

3.

4. 5.

6.

Dutch territorial/legal control over the archipelago was largely confined to Java at the time although gunboats and Dutch agents would ensure that other parts of the archipelago paid nominal allegiance to Batavia. Arguably, most of the ‘various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago’ (TU 3) or anti-colonial predilections that are reported in Conrad’s East are directed against the Dutch (‘the hated Orang Blanda’ [AF 82], ‘the hostilities between Dutch and Malays’ [AF 81]) and the Spanish (‘He will make it hot for the caballeros’ [TU 54]), rather than the British. Eduard Douwes Dekker’s novel Max Havelaar (which Conrad had read) highlights Dutch avarice and oppression of their subjects. The history of Dutch atrocities in the archipelago, including the depopulation of the Banda islands and Ambon through genocidal policies, cruel trade monopolies, and other draconian measures, had created a hatred and distrust for the Dutch among the islanders from the seventeenth century on. Back in Europe, many Dutch people had been appalled by the villainy of their countrymen out in the Indies. The Heeren XVII or Lords Seventeen, directors of the VOC, were alarmed at the scale of the destruction in the Spice Islands perpetrated by mercilessly resolute governors like Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587–1629). A critic in the Netherlands had apparently denounced the company’s many servants and agents in this manner: What honourable men will break up their homes here to take employment as executioners and jailers of a herd of slaves, and to range themselves amongst those free men who by their maltreatment and massacre of the Indies have made the Dutch notorious throughout the Indies as the cruellest nation of the whole world? (quoted in Corn, 1998: 194) The extirpation of spice trees, the extreme methods through which the supply of spices was controlled by the Dutch in order to cause an artificial increase in the price or to stem smuggling and the selling of spice to nonDutch traders, caused many villagers to lose their livelihoods. To be sure, some of Conrad’s Dutch characters are social outcasts and the pitiable victims of a notorious colonial history marked by the lust for lucre and power. On the sufferings brought about by Dutch trade monopolies in the Moluccas, see Vlekke, 1946: 120–1. After Sultan Mahmud Syah and his followers fled Malacca in 1511 following the Portuguese conquest of Malacca, they set up a new capital on the island of Bentan in the Riau-Lingga archipelago. This re-established royal house eventually became the Riau-Johor or Johor-Riau kingdom. ‘Chryse’ is Greek for ‘golden’, hence, ‘Khersonese’. For a historical geography of the Malay peninsula in precolonial times, see Wheatley, 1961. The national identity of the Danish Nielsen a.k.a. Nelson is noteworthy. The Danish East India Company was one of the contenders in the scramble for trade in the Far East, although it would be easily surpassed by the EIC (English East India Company) and the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or United East India Company) Nielsen had been ‘one of us for years’ (TLS 147). Nielsen or Nelson’s admission into the fraternity of expatriate gentlemen-sailors and merchants is closely tied to his having served English firms and married an English girl. ‘One of us’ refers to the English nation as much as it points to whiteness and a common vocation. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869.

Notes 201 7. For historical data to support this statement, see Pelras, 1996. He describes how the Wajo Bugis were in conflict with the Bone Bugis (‘national risings’) in the late seventeenth century and how religious hostilities were also endemic in the resistance against Christianization (‘religious disturbances’). Boni or Bone was also a colony of the Makassarese kingdom of Goa at the time. Like the Johor sultan who had struck an alliance with the Dutch in order to try to recapture Melaka from the Portuguese, Boni nobles and their exiled prince, Arung Palakka, offered themselves as an auxiliary fighting force to the Dutch in order to avenge themselves on Goa/Makassar. Bone’s Dutch-backed victory over its erstwhile conqueror Goa/Makassar in 1669 had been a landmark event; it set in motion a chain of emigrations among the South Sulawesi peoples (i.e. Bugis/Makassar migrants) fleeing civil wars in their homelands and altered their patterns of navigation in the Malay Archipelago. Among those peoples affected by the fall of Makassar and who would later make up Conrad’s Bugis ‘heroes’ were the Wajo Bugis. Christian Pelras comments that the Wajo Bugis, for one, ‘never accepted Bone’s suzerainty, although after an armed rebellion was put down by a joint Bone-Dutch force, they were seemingly content to express their wish for freedom through successful trading enterprises overseas’ (Pelras, 1996: 144–5). To be sure, Bugis migrations, from the seventeenth century to this day, are also economic strategies motivated by the desire to find wealth and material stability abroad. 8. Srivijaya was the leading entrepôt state/empire in the archipelago from the late seventh century to the thirteenth. This Buddhist maritime empire was based in Sumatra and is synonymous with its capital, Palembang. For a history of Srivijaya, see Wolters, 1970. 9. The prime minister during the reign of Hayam Wuruk (a Majapahit king), Gajah Mada, is reputed to be the ‘first to succeed in unifying the whole archipelago under one authority’ and ‘the first conscious empire-builder of Indonesia. Never before had the islands been united under one government, nor did this happen again until the Netherlanders completed their conquest’ (Vlekke, 1946: 39–40). 10. The British interregnum of 1811–16 was the result of Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of the Netherlands. The Stadhouder, Prince William V of Orange, issued a directive to all Dutch colonies in the Indies to surrender all authority to the British who would administer the colonies until such time that the Netherlands was freed from French occupation. 11. See Bastin, 1954. 12. For more on the Treaty, see Mills, 2003: 86–98. On Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the Malay world leading up to the Treaty, see Tarling, 1962. 13. For a history of the English East India Company, see Keay, 1991. 14. Liberalism in the Netherlands saw to it that slavery officially ceased to exist in Batavian-controlled territory on 1 January 1860. However, slavery and the trade and smuggling of slaves continued to exist despite their express prohibition. According to Islamic law, only non-Muslims could be enslaved. In the peninsular Malay realms, slaves were likely to be pagan aboriginals (orang asli) from the interior. After 1874, slavery was abolished in the Malay states controlled by the British; however, as Khoo Kay Kim notes: ‘The abolition of slavery freed many bondsmen but did not uplift the status of the rakyat’ (Khoo, 1991: 128).

202 Notes 15. In The Return, Lingard asks Mr Carter if his chief officer was making his way to Singapore ‘[t]hrough the Straits of Rhio’ (TR 35). 16. The Malay term for Fatherland is tanah air meaning ‘land of water’. 17. James Warren notes: From the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Southeast Asia felt the full force of the Iranun slave raiders of the Sulu sultanate, as one coastal population after another was hunted down. Captive people in their tens of thousands, seized by these sea raiders from right across Southeast Asia, were put to work in the sultanate’s fisheries, in the birds’ nest caves, or in the cultivation of rice and transport of commodities to local markets in the regional redistributive network. (Warren, 2001: 44) The lucrative China trade had a big hand in fuelling the demand. 18. For Warren, Conrad’s treatment of pirates echoes ‘Brooke’s essentialist, racist portrait of the Iranun, based on deep-seated animosity and mistrust’; however, Conrad ‘was more inclined to portray what it was about the Iranun background and their life which led them to act as they did in their relationships with Europeans’ (Warren, 2001: 57). 19. The ‘line’ in question is probably the longitudinal meridian identified in the Treaty of Tordesillas of June, 1494, by which the Kings of Spain and Portugal divided the entire globe between themselves. 20. The text’s ‘stated aim was “to set forth the genealogy of the Malay rajas and the ceremonial of their courts for the information of [the king’s] descendants ... that they may be conversant with the history and derive profit therefrom” ’ (quoted in Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 32). 21. There are numerous hikayats in Malay historiography focusing on the many Malay sultanates or kingdoms: Hikayat Acheh, Hikayat Johor, Hikayat Kedah, Hikayat Siak, Hikayat Pahang, Hikayat Kelantan, Hikayat Patani, and so on. Marlow’s tale of Jim’s political fortunes qualifies easily as Hikayat Patusan. 22. Loosely, ‘tradition’, ‘customary law’, a ‘code of conduct’.

2


1. For a detailed study of the Residential system and its ambiguities, see Sadka, 1968: 38–64. 2. For an account of British Residents and their relationships with Malay rulers, see Gullick, 1992. 3. The Bugis from South Sulawesi had emigrated in large numbers throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the western parts of the archipelago in search of wealth or to escape civil unrest at home. Notably, many came to settle in Riau-Lingga, seat of the Johor Empire, where they gradually involved themselves in dynastic quarrels among the Malay rulers. ‘[T]hrough armed action and strategic marriage they succeeded in becoming one of the major political forces in the Riau-Johor sultanate and in the peninsula as a whole’ (Pelras, 1996: 145). 4. See Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 32–4. A few words on the spiritual source of Srivijaya and its successor, Melaka, are necessary in order to explain the Malays’ image of authority and Conrad’s appropriation of this cultural feature. The Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals) relates the story of how the Melaka

Notes 203 kings are descended from Alexander the Great and how three of the Macedonian emperor’s descendants had miraculously appeared on Bukit Si Guntang, a sacred hill in Palembang, Sumatra. Claiming lineage to the princes meant a legitimacy and daulat (very loosely, ‘sovereignty’), which were vital to the survival of the institution of kingship itself. Whoever committed treason against the divine self of the king would suffer the most severe and painful penalty. When Raja Kecil from Siak (in the east coast of Sumatra) claimed to be the heir to the late Sultan Mahmud Syah (murdered in 1699) of Johor-Riau, he invoked the support of the Minangkabau spiritual overlord at Pagarruyung in central Sumatra. The Minangkabau rulers claim to be the descendants of one of the princes who had appeared in Bukit Si Guntang and therefore, Raja Kecil could suggest a connection with the Melaka dynasty, which also shares a similar ancestry. Thomas Stamford Raffles, on an expedition to ‘Pageruyong’ in Sumatra just after relinquishing his post as Lieutenant-Governor of Java, waxed lyrical over the mythical genealogy of kingship in that particular corner of the archipelago: ‘Here, then, for the first time, was I able to trace the source of that power, the origin of that nation, so extensively scattered over the Eastern Archipelago’ (Raffles, 1991: 359–63, emphasis added). Raffles seems to be referring to the Minangkabau people, whose migrations to other parts of the archipelago saw large populations settled in places like Negeri Sembilan on the peninsula. However, because of his tendency to conflate all the different archipelagic communities into one ‘Malayu nation’, he was probably referring to the Malays as a whole. He was also referring to the spiritual seat of Minangkabau royalty itself, Pagarruyung. Today, Palembang, Pagarruyung, and other such ‘shrines’ live on in the collective folk memory of Malays. These places signify one important truth: they confer Malay rajahs with a sanctity, legitimacy, magical power, and pedigree which are prestigious in the eyes of their subjects. Significantly, Jim is believed by his followers to have ‘racial prestige’ and ‘the reputation of invincible, supernatural power’ (LJ 361). Marlow would enlarge on this theme by adding: ‘He too was the heir of a shadowy and mighty tradition!’ (LJ 244). For the inhabitants of Patusan, Jim ‘appeared like a creature not only of another kind but of another essence. Had they not seen him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended upon them from the clouds’ (LJ 229). In the story of Jim’s ascendancy, Conrad’s fiction interfaces with an aspect of Malay cultural history that endows not only a romantic quality but also an aura of historical significance to his tales. 5. C.R. Boxer notes that in the Javanese world, myths had been inspired by the East–West encounter and some of them have been immortalized in the local literature: In the lengthy and exceedingly complex Javanese poem on the Baron Sakender, which in its present form dates from the second half of the eighteenth century, one of the principal characters, Baron Sukumul, marries the ‘princess with the flaming vagina’ from the Priangan (‘Fairyland’) highlands of West Java. Their son, Mur Djankung, alias Jan Pieterszoon Coen, was the founder of Batavia in 1619 – a curious metamorphosis for that grim Calvinist from Hoorn. This poem and others like it reflect a weird and wonderful mixture of the pre-Islamic Javanese spirit world with later historical facts and fancies. The sacro-magical nature of the bulk of this literature likewise embodies the beliefs of Javanese of high and low

204

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Notes degree, all of whom lived in a mental world thickly populated by spirits and supernatural powers. It is difficult to imagine a more different intellectual background from that of the eighteenth-century Netherlanders, whether these latter were rigid Calvinists, or else influenced by the Enlightenment. (Boxer, 1979: 93–5) Rupert Emerson concludes that ‘of one thing one may be sure: what is being protected is the interest of the protecting State and of the economic groups within it which profit from imperialism’ (Emerson, 1964: 58). This could refer to one of a few possibilities: either the peninsular orang asli (aboriginals), the indigenous peoples of the Bornean interior, or the tribal Bataks of the Sumatran interior, depending on the fictional location of Patusan itself. J. de V. Allen provides two reasons to support this: firstly, European institutions and structures were to be established as quickly as possible among the natives and secondly, ‘the Residential System was Direct Rule in the sense that it was effectively in European hands from District Officer level upwards’ (de V. Allen, 1964: 50). In his study of Malay society in the late nineteenth century, J.M. Gullick observes that the ‘Malay villager was normally relaxed and tolerant in his religious outlook’ (Gullick, 1989: 292). Ironically, preserving the Islamic monarchies simply meant that appointed Residents were to advise the rulers on all matters except those related to custom and religion. Conversely, Hugh Clifford pondered over whether Islam could pose a potential threat to empire and explored this apprehension in his fiction. In the short story, ‘Our Trusty and Well-beloved’ (Malayan Monochromes), the natives plot a jihad against the colonial regime only to be foiled by the ‘Tuan Gubnor’. Clifford, who had had some first-hand experience with Malay rebels, also wrote that if those against whom he rebels chance to belong to any other faith, no matter what the cause of the quarrel, no matter how lax the rebel’s own practice may be his revolt is at once raised to the dignity of a sabil Allah, or holy war against the infidel ... in this lies the real strength of the Muhammadan population. (Clifford, 1927: 229) In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the British seemed unperturbed by any change in religious attitudes among the Malays. William Roff describes the perceived British nonchalance towards returned pilgrims: British colonial officials, though sharing the prevailing view of returned hajis as ‘leeches on the toil of their fellow men’, seldom thought them, as did the Dutch in nineteenth-century Indonesia, to be sources of serious social unrest, and far from attempting to restrict the pilgrimage actually did much to assist it. (Roff, 1994: 71) In stark contrast to this, during the nineteenth century, Dutch suspicion of the hajis and the haj itself as probable saboteurs of colonial administration is demonstrated in the fact that the majority of pilgrims from the Netherlands Indies had to depart to Saudi Arabia from the Straits Settlements and not from any Batavian-held port. For Anthony Milner, ‘[t]he fact that they departed from the British colony reflects the anxiety of the Dutch government about the political consequences of the haj’ (Milner, 1995: 159).

Notes 205 13. Jim himself had been busy conveying 800 pilgrims to the Holy City on the Patna before the journey was so fatefully interrupted. In the nineteenth century, steam power had enabled many more Muslims in the Malay world to perform the haj or pilgrimage to Mecca. Singapore was the regional embarkation point for ‘that pious voyage’ (LJ 15). In this way, colonial communications had inadvertently revitalized the older network of the PanIslamic world or dar al-Islam through which traders, scholars, and missionaries had spread new knowledge, ideas, and attitudes since the thirteenth century. 14. A religious scholar and teacher. 15. It was said of Rajah Brooke that he ‘knew his Malays’ and had ‘an instinctive understanding of the Malay mind’ (Payne, 1986: 33, 43). 16. Khoo Kay Kim suggests that, initially, the Islamic intellectual ferment or ‘insurgence’ of the early twentieth century was not so much consciously anti-colonial as it was symptomatic of ‘a mood for change’ (1991: 138). This view is also held by Peter Riddell in Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World: Transmission and Responses: the old world familiar to Southeast Asian Muslims was to undergo rapid change during the 19th century. Colonial powers gained varying degrees of control over the daily lives of Malay Muslims, with dramatic results. Old dogmas came to be increasingly put to the test and found wanting. As the 19th century closed, other solutions were sought for the new problem of external colonial domination. Furthermore, new theological approaches were explored as the dominance of a cult of continuity gave way to a new cult of change. (Riddell, 2001: 204) 17. In Chapter 2 of his book, Christopher GoGwilt discusses Conrad’s recognition of ‘the fallacies of distinguishing between “civilization” and “savagery” ’ (GoGwilt, 1995: 54). 18. In Malay historical classics and origin myths, the prestigious line of Melaka kings is traced to Alexander the Great whose ‘heavenly’ descendants miraculously appeared atop a sacred hill in Palembang, Sumatra. The ability to claim descent from these sacred beings legitimized the ruler’s status and sovereignty and endowed him with divine, magical powers.

3 The Rest of That Pantai Band 1. For a history of European colonial society and its relations with nonEuropeans in Malaya, see Butcher, 1979. 2. Seah was a millionaire and one of the wealthiest Chinese capitalists in the Straits Settlements in the 1870s and 1880s. 3. On the relationship between opium, the Chinese, and the British Empire in the East, see Trocki, 1990. 4. This was the kangchu system, kangchu referring to the ‘leader of the settlement’. A document called the surat sungai (river letter) was issued to the licensee. 5. A regie was a government-run monopoly as opposed to a revenue farm. 6. Probably the later immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century itself.

206 Notes 7. ‘Alfuro’ or Alfuren is a Portuguese term for the non-Islamic and nonChristian peoples in parts of Sulawesi (Celebes) and Maluku (the Moluccas). On the Alfuro, see Moore’s article ‘Who are the Alfuros?’, 2007b. Peranakan alludes to those born from the union between locals and foreign Asians. 8. The majority of Arab emigrants to Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century and earlier were from the Hadhramaut region in the Arabian peninsula; only a small number were from the Hijaz region. For essays on the Hadhrami diaspora in the Indian Ocean region, see Freitag and ClarenceSmith, 1997. 9. Syed Mohsin himself was not born in the Straits. He arrived in Singapore in 1840. 10. In Victory, Heyst informs Lena: ‘Orang Kaya is the head man of the village, Lena’ (V 348). 11. William Roff writes: In July 1892 the Dato’ Mentri of Pahang had a conversation in Singapore with Sir Cecil Clementi Smith, the High Commissioner, in which he alleged that the cause of the present Pahang disturbances lay with a certain Arab Sayyid, who had toured the southern states asking the chiefs to sign a document asking for the assistance of the Sultan of Turkey in ridding the Malay states of the British. Smith reported the matter in a letter to Edward Fairfield of the Colonial Office. (Roff, 1994: 71 n) 12. C.M. Turnbull states that ‘[i]n the late nineteenth century Singapore was the centre of considerable political intrigue, with many peninsular chiefs coming to deal with officials, lawyers, and businessmen. It also provided a refuge for chiefs who were dislodged by British intervention in the Malay states’ (Turnbull, 1977: 100). Some of these conspirators were Arabs. 13. On attitudes towards mixed unions and half-castes in the Netherlands East Indies, see Stoler, 2000. 14. In Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Antoinette Mason is the madwoman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In the Rhys novel, Bertha’s Caribbean origins and white creole identity are explored in a tale of patriarchal oppression, racial inequality, and colonial tyranny. Hugh Clifford’s vehement objection to Conrad’s portrayal of Nina and her mother stems from the conventional view that Eurasians and native women married to whites are wont to suppress their Asiatic origins and become more European than Europeans themselves: Like all native women under similar circumstances, [Mrs. Almayer’s] one wish would be to see her daughter brought up to be more European than the Europeans; and the reader’s credulity is even more severely tried when he is told that the girl herself, on her return after some years of schooling in Singapore, shares her mother’s desire, and is only anxious to revert to the position of a native. (Clifford, 1898: 142) 15. See Griffith, 1995: 136–48. 16. The quotation from the story is extracted from In a Corner of Asia (Clifford, 1925: 200).

Notes 207

4 A Vain and Floating Appearance 1. For an insightful examination of Conrad’s response to and engagement with the popular visual culture of his times, see Donovan, 2005: 15–62. 2. Clifford had on more than one occasion remarked that Conrad’s knowledge of Malays and their world was grossly inaccurate and misled. In his note to A Personal Record, Conrad states for the record that he has ‘never pretended to any such knowledge’ (NB 89–90). 3. On subjective vision and visual modernity in the nineteenth century, see Crary, 1990. 4. Referring to The Rescue. 5. Although Conrad uses this simile to describe and praise Garnett’s work (the eventually uncompleted London, a series of city sketches), his keen approval of this literary effect seems to suggest that he too had attempted to produce the same effect: ‘the picture is seen through the crafty tracery of words, like a building through leaves, both distinct – and hidden’ (CL 1: 331). 6. There were orang laut (literally ‘sea people’) groups who lived in the RiauLingga archipelago (a cluster of islands situated between the southern tip of the Malay peninsula and the east coast of Sumatra; Riau-Lingga played a very significant role in the shifting fortunes of the Melakan sultanate and the history of the Malay world itself) where their descendants still live to this day. An orang laut community, the Bajau, was also found on the northwestern coasts of Borneo. Today the Bajau live on the land and are no longer ‘sea people’. During the late nineteenth century, ‘specific policies of taxation, licensing, and resettlement instituted by the British North Borneo Company finally forced the Bajau community to move to the land to seek other forms of subsistence and thus brought about lasting changes in Bajau society’ (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 132). In An Outcast of the Islands, Mahmat ‘Banjer and his two brothers were Bajow vagabonds’ (OI 309) whom Ali viewed with great distrust.

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Index Note: Number spans may indicate separate mentions rather than unbroken discussion

A Personal Record, 9, 11, 26–8, 42, 67, 77, 90, 104–6, 150, 152, 156, 166 Adams, David, 99–100 Alatas, Syed Farid, 122 Allen, J. de V., 89–90 Almayer erasing Nina, 164 as Indo-European, 133–4 opium use, 114–15 Almayer, Mrs, 59, 138–9 Almayer, Nina, 101, 133–5, 191 cultural identity, 137 as Malay, 135 mother’s influence, 137–8 performance of identity, 136 Almayer’s Folly, 2–3, 6, 8, 19, 51, 53, 62–3, 104–5, 129, 134, 138, 147, 168, 182, 191 Arabs, 123 Author’s Note, 5–6, 190–1 chaos, 30–1 cultural identity, 137 erasure, 178–9 the Folly, 114 Macassar, 55–6 magic, 94–5 Nina, 135 opium, 114 racist assumptions, 101–2 trade, 43–4 An Outcast of the Islands, 19, 113, 116, 121, 127, 139, 147, 164, 168 Arab networks, 125 Arabs, 123 Author’s Note, 30–1 industrial modernity, 45 magic, 95 piracy, 59 Syed Abdullah as wise, 124

‘An Outpost of Progress’, 1 Andaya, Barbara and Leonard, 4, 47–8, 55, 57, 59, 77, 85–6, 144–5, 168–9 Anderson, Benedict, 20 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, 50, 169, 197n anxieties, cultural, 31 Arabs, 86, 120–30 Conrad’s treatment of, 126 contribution to intellectual development, 129–30 cultural identity, 122 exercise of authority, 125 influence, 124–6 paternalism, 126 and piracy, 127–30 politics, 124 role in colonial state, 121–2 art, dialogue with history, 4, 188–9 atonement, 87 authority of Arabs, 125 colonial, 116 ‘Autocracy and War’, 189–90 Babalatchi, 51, 59, 62–3, 129, 147, 168 Baharuddin, Shamsul Amri, 34–5 Bajau, 168 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8–9 Ban Kah Choon, 12 ‘Because of the Dollars’, 114 believers, and unbelievers, 100, 103 betrayal, 136 binarism, 69–70, 101–2 Bird, Isabella, 92 blankness, 163–5, 178 blind spots, 162–5, 170 ‘Books’, 13 Borneo, 44, 50–1 227

228 Index boundaries, contested, 3 Brantlinger, Patrick, 4, 33 Britain consolidation of territories, 81 extent of jurisdiction, 49 influence, 3 British Indirect Rule, 3, 24 British-Malayan community, 105 Britishness, 116–17 Brooke, Margaret, 50–1 Brooke, Sir James, 25, 50–1, 169 anti-piracy campaigns, 52–3 Conrad’s description, 52–3 as inspiration for Conrad, 50–2 ‘brown nations’, focus on, 52 Bugis, 17, 21, 46, 55–8, 60, 66, 86, 92, 201n–2n bureaucrats, 82 Butcher, John, 110, 116 camera obscura, 153–5 centre, control, 48–9 chaos, 30–1, 162 charms, 100–1 charts, 163–4 China, trade, 43 Chinese Europeanization, 116 in Malay Archipelago, 107 opium use, 107–8, 120 peranakan, 198n ubiquity, 107 Christianity, and savagery, 101–2 citizenship, 105 Civil Service, 82 civilizing, 26 Clammer, John R., 144 Clarke, Sir Andrew, 88–9 Clemens, Florence, 3, 21 Clifford, James, 37–8 Clifford, Hugh, 13, 22, 33, 35–7, 77, 90–1, 104, 143–4, 150, 152, 188 Cochrane, Sir Thomas, 51 Collits, Terry, 3–4, 36, 66, 69, 71, 89–90, 118–19, 181 colonial state, and Chinese, 106–16 colonialism, 3, 27, 32–3, 47, 58 British, 48

distorted vision, 171–2, 174 and ethnic boundaries, 144 and identity, 19 internal frontiers, 146 kingship, 74 moral justification, 76–7, 90 and opium, 108–9 power/authority, 116 redefinition of race, 145 rivalry, 7 use of precolonial models, 79 colonists, model, 116–20 complicity, imperial, 32 conservatism, 33 construct, visual, 6 control, central, 48–9 Cornelius, 130–1 correspondence, 124 Crary, Jonathan, 154–6 credibility, 10 creed, Conrad’s aesthetic, 67 crisis, impending, 185 Cross-cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Hampson), 12 culture hybridity, 15–16, 26 hybridization, 198n and nature, 101–2 popular, 29 pride in, 19 visual, 6, 148 Curle, Richard, 13, 176, 181–2 Da Souza, Joanna, 141 Da Souza, Leonard, 139–40 Da Souza tribe, 139–40 ‘damaged kaleidoscope’, 149–52 Das Kapital, 155 daulat (sovereignty), 79–80 de Souza, Stephen, 139 departure, from Malay Archipelago, 1 derhaka (treason), 79–80 development, aesthetic, 1 dialogue between art and history, 4 between fiction and history, 4–5, 7–14 diaspora, 20

Index 229 Dick, Howard, 110–12 Diehl, F.W., 113 difference, discourse of, 101 diplomacy, 53 discrimination, against Eurasians, 132 Donovan, Stephen, 28, 32–3, 99, 148, 162, 174–5, 182, 186 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 9 Dryden, Linda, 33 East, imaginary, as unstable construct, 164–5 Eastern Archipelago, as construct, 2–3 EIC (English East India Company), 56, 110 Emerson, Rupert, 105 empire of Believers, 124–5 as pictorial commodity, 158 England, attitude to opium, 114–15 entrepreneurs, 116–20 equality, between Chinese and Europeans, 112 erasure, 178–9 essentializing, 35–6 Estetika (Bakhtin), 9 ethnic survival, in colonial hostility, 58 Eurasians. see also Serani colonial classification, 131 discrimination, 132 as marginal, 144–5 permissible roles, 144–5 recognized as European, 131 Europeanism, 189–90 Europeans, relations with non-Malays, 105 eyes, 147–8, 186, 189 eyesight. see sight facts contested, 34 irony, 32 jumbled with fiction, 40–2 transformation to legend and myth, 71 trouble with, 32–40

as unimportant, 22 Federal Constitution, definition of Malay, 18 Federated Malay States, 81 Ferguson, Niall, 79 Fernando, Lloyd, 2, 19, 23, 31, 40 feudalism, 90–1 fiction as alternative/complementary reality, 39 collision with history, 66 as complementing history, 170 dialogue with history, 4–5, 7–14 as history, 167–8 jumbled with facts, 40–2 fidelity, visual, 148 flashbacks, 182 fragments, 4, 68, 149, 152, 162, 182, 185, 188–9 frame-narrative, 184 frame-narrators, 5, 182, 186 frame-spectators, 184–7 ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, 44–5, 57, 131 Fried, Michael, 178–9 frontiers, internal, 146 Galsworthy, John, 36 Garnett, Edward, 176, 182 gaze, reciprocated, 179 globalization, early modern, 2 GoGwilt, Christopher, 18, 20, 24, 37, 75–6, 94, 100, 135–6 gold, Borneo, 44 ‘Golden Khersonese’, myth of, 42 Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A., 20, 134, 175, 181, 183 Griffith, John, 31, 138 guilt, 87 Gullick, J.M., 92 gun-running, 56–7 gutta-percha, 44–5 Hadhrami diaspora, 121 haj, 40–1 hajis, 93–4, 102 ‘hallucinated community’, 26 ‘hallucinated vision’, 26, 105 Hamid, Daing Abdul, 16

230 Index Hampson, Robert, 7, 12, 18–19, 35, 66, 69–71, 119, 125, 136, 161–2 Harper, T.N., 40–1, 79 Hay, Eloise Knapp, 100 ‘he who is made lord’ (Yang di-Pertuan), 74–81 ‘Heart of Darkness’, 37–8, 70, 186 Hedges, Sir Charles, 61 ‘Henry James’ (essay), 8–9 heroism, possibility of, 90 Heyst, 32, 118–20, 131, 147, 163–4, 185 Hikayat Abdullah, 83 Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa (Kedah Annals), 24–5 Hikayat Tuan Jim, 69–74 hikayats, 24–5, 64–5, 67, 70 Hirsch, R., 152, 154 historical sources, 4 historiography, 64 history collision with fiction, 66 as complementing fiction, 170 Conrad’s debt to, 10 as context for literature, 189 dialogue with art, 4, 188–9 dialogue with fiction, 4–5, 7–14 fiction as, 167–8 and literature, 64–5 history of ideas, 36 Holden, Philip, 117, 140, 143–4 Holquist, Michael, 8, 31 Hudig, 112, 133, 139 Hussein, Ismail, 64 Hyam, R., 133, 144 hybridity, 118–19 hybridization, cultural, 198n ideas, history of, 36 identities blurring, 115 claiming, 140 colonial, 19 colonial definitions, 34–5 within colonial states, 106 destabilizing, 117 ethnic, 17 hybridized, 16, 118–19 imposed, 21 liminal, 131

political, 23 religious, 23, 26 as white, 114 identity Arabs, 122–3 Conrad’s, 7 contributing factors, 92 cultural, 125 European, 140 national, 136 performative aspect, 133 performed, 136 religious, 93 illicit activities, significance of, 55 illusion, 175–9, 182, 189 imagery, 8, 30, 72–3, 91, 138, 154, 162 images, reproduction, 157 imaginary worlds, 2–3 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 20 impassivity, visual, 162 imperialism competition, 50 complicity with, 32–3 Dutch, 33 In Search of Conrad (Young), 139 India, influence of, 18 Indians, 145–6 Indirect Rule, 74, 81 Dutch, 82–3 pragmatic basis, 87 as veneer, 88 Indo-European, 133–4 Indonesia Raya, 15 industrial modernity, 44–5 influence of Arabs, 124–5 Indian, 18 instruments, optical, 153 insurgents, fear of, 144 intellectual development, Arab contribution, 129–30 internal frontiers, 146 intertexts, 8 Iranun, 58–9, 202n irony, 6, 23, 26, 41–2, 63, 161 of Chinese opium addicts, 108–9 concerning facts, 32 Islam, 91–4, 204–5n Islamization, 121

Index 231 Jewel, 66, 141–3, 145 Jim. see also Lord Jim ‘new sphere’, 81–91 Jim-Eng as agent of imperialism, 113–14 loyalty, 117 as opium addict, 113 Johan, Khasnor, 16, 18 John Chinaman, 109, 112, 114, 116, 119–20 John Company/Jan Compagnie, 45, 109, 114 Jones, 79 Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (Donovan), 28, 148 Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections (Martin), 150 journalism, 129–30 Kamudi (pseudonym), 2 Kapitan China, 112 ‘Karain: A Memory’, 2–3, 22, 57, 63–4, 74, 85, 182 as allegory, 98–9 critique of nation, 100 magic and the supernatural, 97–8 Karim, W.J., 15, 48–9 kerajaans, 74, 121 Kettle, Arnold, 20 Khoo Kay Kim, 64–5, 75, 82, 92 kings, 83 kingship, 84, 91 Kitab Tawarikh Melayu (Winstedt and Hamid), 16 knowledge, 6, 11, 13, 37 Knowles, Owen, 5 kongsi (economic brotherhood), 109–13 Krenn, Heliéna, 108, 117, 134, 136, 151 language, as sign of identity, 140 language of ‘facts’, 32 lies, and truth, 38 life review, 174–5 Lingard, Tom, 30, 44, 51, 96–7, 113, 127, 143 literature, 64–5, 189

lithography, 157–8 London, 99 loopholes, 5, 9, 11, 132, 135, 147, 175, 189 Lord Jim, 3, 23–4, 32, 36–41, 49–53, 65–7, 119, 147, 149, 152, 156, 162, 165, 171, 177–8, 184–7 awareness of oppression, 174 as hikayat, 25, 69–74 Jewel’s supplication, 141–3 Patusan sequence, 71 the sea, 183 similes and imagery, 72–3 thematic sectioning, 69 trial, 161 loyalty, 117–18 Lugard, Sir F.D., 88 Macassar (Makassar), 44, 55–6 magic, 80, 94–103 magic circle, 21, 27, 185 magic lantern, 184 Majapahit empire, 47–8 malaise, 99–100 Malay Conrad’s sense, 14–29 contestable idea, 14 as distinct from Malayan, 14 nationalist understanding, 16–18 precolonial polity, 75 as seer, 160 stereotype, 93 western views, 21 Malay Administrative Service, 82 Malay Reservation Enactment, 34 Malayan, defining, 14 Malays, as Conrad’s creations, 35 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 38 Mammon, 102 Maphilindo, 15 marauding, 128–9 marks, making and removing, 164 Marle, Hans van, 30 Marlow, 5, 24–6, 32, 38–9, 65, 71, 165 as blank page, 179 as Conrad’s fictional other, 70 as intermediary, 73 Jewel’s supplication, 141–3 as letter writer, 164

232 Index Marlow – continued narrative, 5, 39, 69, 73–5, 178, 182–3 recognition of illusion, 175 vision, 157–8, 177–81, 183 Maroola, Dain, 54 marriages, mixed, 122 Marsden, William, 35–6 Marx, Karl, 155 masculinity, 100 Massy, 175 Matheson, Virginia, 65 Maupassant, Guy de, 163 Max Havelaar (Multatuli), 54 McNair, Major Frederick, 68, 70 meaning colonial, 39–40 contested, 11 idea of, 4 as relative, 5 relative and ultimate, 39 Melaka, 15, 202–3n people, 15, 17–21, 48, 75, 79–80, 86 place, 18, 46, 48, 50, 58, 60, 83–4 Melayu Raya, 15 membuat negeri (founding a realm), 85 mestizos, 131 metaphors, visual, 157 métissage (interracial unions), 130, 133. see also mixed marriages Milligan, Barry, 114–15 Mills, Lennox, 26 Milner, A., 60 mimicry, 69, 118–19, 145 miscegenation, 132, 143–4 misrepresentation, 37 mixed marriages, 122, 138–9. see also métissage (interracial unions) ‘model state’, 33 modernity, 44–5, 99–100 ‘Mohammedans’. see Muslims monarchy, Malay, 75 Mongia, Padmini, 142 Moore, Gene M., 5, 52, 58–9 moral bankruptcy, 4 moral duty, 143 Morrison, 131 Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), 54 Mundy, Rodney, 51

Muslims, 40–1 in Conrad’s imaginary world, 91–4 as providers of ironic commentary, 94–5 Mussulmen. see Muslims Myths, 203–4n Najder, Zdzisław, 190 narrative Marlow’s, 5, 39, 69, 73–5, 178, 182 national, 117 narratives, hikayats, 24 Nasrani. see Serani nation, Conrad’s view of, 20 national affiliation, 20 nationalism, Polish, 20 nationality, as contestable, 105 natives, stereotypes, 140 nature, and culture, 101–2 Nazarene. see Serani Netherlands, 199–200n colonialism, 3 extent of jurisdiction, 53–4 Nigger of the Narcissus, Author’s Note, 27–8 nihilism, 33 non-Malays, European relations with, 105 Noor, Farish, 18–19, 24–5 Notes on Life and Letters, 3, 8–10, 12–13, 22, 36–7, 67–9, 105, 142, 152, 163, 176–7, 188–90 Notes on My Books, 1–2, 5–6, 10, 12–13, 21, 23, 27–31, 35, 37, 39–40, 62, 64, 67–70, 100, 148–52, 156–8, 170, 175–7, 179, 183, 186, 189–91, 207n novels, as ethnographic evidence, 58 Nusantara, 15, 17 occultism, 102 opium as allegory for colonialism, 115 Almayer’s Folly, 114 association with Chinese, 120 and colonialism, 108–9 economic importance, 111–12 The Rescue, 113 use, 107–8

Index 233 Opium Farming system, 110 optical illusions, 189 optical instruments, 153–6, 189 orang laut (sea people), 58–9, 168–9, 172–4, 207n ‘others’, 27 Othman, Mohammed Redzuan, 123 overlord, 86 Padris, 93 ‘Pantai Band’, 26–7 paper, blank, 163 paternalism, Arabs, 126 Patna episode, 40, 53, 95 Patusan, 51–2, 85–7 peoples, Conrad’s attitude to, 189–90 Perak and the Malays (McNair), 68, 70 peranakan, 198n perception historically informed, 68–9 and truth, 152–8 phenakistiscope, 153 photography, 157–9, 170–1, 174 pilgrims, 40–1 piracy, 51–3, 168–9 and Arabs, 127–30 campaign against, 61–3, 169 economic function, 59–60 and international law, 60 and politics, 58–64 and religion, 127–8 places, sacred/magical, 80 politics Arab involvement, 124 complexity, 85 and piracy, 58–64 regional, 3 trade and insurgency, 46 pollution, racial, 132 Polo, Marco, 42 population, diversity, 7, 15–16 Poradowska, Marguerite, 8 ports, rivalry, 47 power and allegiance, 85 colonial, 116 divine, magical, 79 indigenous and European, 48–9

reciprocity, 48–9 shifts, 86–7 and weaponry, 57 Pritchett, V.S., 20 protagonists, white, 52 protected states, 83 protection, 78, 104–5, 120 pseudonym, 2 Purcell, Victor, 107 purity, 19, 132 ‘quarter and pass’ system, 123 Queen Victoria, 99–100 race, 17–18, 26, 145 ‘race of men’, 17–18, 26–7 racism, 58, 101–2, 143–4 Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford, 20–1, 47–8, 70, 121, 123, 190 rajah subject’s belief in, 90–1 as supreme authority, 83 ‘real’, contested, 35 redemption, 87, 100 regeneration, 104 Reid, Anthony, 35, 92–3 relativity, 9 religion, 92, 101–2, 127–8 rescue, 142 Residential rule, 81–91, 104 Resink, G.J., 3–4, 22, 44–5, 49, 60, 62, 83 revenue, commerce and piracy, 60 revenue farming, 110 reviews, 188 rhythm, pre-colonial, 49 Ricardo, 164–5, 185 Roberts, Andrew Michael, 100 Romanticism, 181 rulers as captive, 76 supernatural qualities, 80, 95–8 virtual, 74–5, 87–8 Rutter, Owen, 60–1 sacred/magical places, 80 Sadka, Emily, 88–9 sakti (divine magical power), 79 Sandberg, Mark B., 153

234 Index Sarawak, British influence, 53 savagery, and Christianity, 101–2 scepticism, 36, 38, 176 Schwarz, Daniel R., 39, 136 science, treatment of, 36–7 scribes, 80–1 sea, 162–4 Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), 15–16, 18, 24, 64, 70, 202–3n self, as evolving construct, 11 Selim, Syed Abdullah bin, 121, 123 senses, trust in, 160 Serang, 97, 151, 160–2 Serani, 130–45. see also Eurasians Conrad’s attitude to, 132 as soiled, 141 as unwholesome, 143 ‘Sharif’, 127–9 Shaw, 51 sight, 147–8 fallacy of, 170 fallibility, 5–6 as privileged sense, 149–50 signs, 164 similes, Lord Jim, 72–3 Singapore, 40–1 sinkhehs (newcomers), 107 sinophobia, 112–13 slavery, 58–9, 201n–2n smuggling, 54, 56 social consciousness, 9 solidarity, 90, 190–1 sources, 6, 22 sovereignty, 74, 79–80 Spain, extent of jurisdiction, 54 spatial accuracy, 12 spectacles, embedded, 184 spectator, 184–7 spice trade, 42–3 spices, smuggling, 56 Srivijaya, 202–3n Stape, J.H., 12 states, protected and unprotected, 83 steamships, 62 Stein, 38–9, 142–3 stereoscopes, 158–9 Sterne, Mr, 165 Stoler, Ann L., 132–3, 138, 146 Straits Arabs, 122

Straits Chinese, 108–9, 116 Studies in Brown Humanity (Clifford), 37, 152 subjectivity, ethnographic, 38 Suez Canal, 45 Sulu, 58–9 superiority, racial, 33–4 surfaces, reflective, 183 ‘surplus of seeing’, 8 ‘surplus of vision’, 28 survival, ethnic, 58 Swettenham, Frank, 35, 92, 159, 188 syair, 64 Syeds, 122 tableaux, 179–84 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 159 Tales of Unrest, 84, 98, 129, 147, 182–3 Tamils, 145–6 Tarling, Nicholas, 56, 127–9 task, of writer, 27–8 tax farming, 110 Temenggongs, 110 terra incognita, 163 text, idea of, 4 textual tradition, Conrad’s reinvention, 67 textual, versus visual, 158–9 The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (Karl and Davies), 1–3, 6, 8, 11, 13–14, 22–3, 25, 28–30, 32, 36, 51, 150–2, 154, 156, 158, 162–3, 165, 176, 178, 182, 186–8, 207 ‘The End of the Tether’, 12, 45, 97, 146, 159–60, 165–76 piracy, 59 timeframe, 168–9 The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (Bird), 92 The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire, 20 ‘The Lagoon’, 1 The Nigger of the Narcissus, 191 Author’s Note, 148 the Queen, as object of awe, 98

Index 235 The Rescue, 7, 23, 26–7, 42, 46, 49, 51–2, 57, 62, 93–4, 127, 129, 147, 160–1, 164, 183 magic, 95 opium, 113 piracy, 59–60 ‘The Secret Sharer’, 172 The Shadow Line, 2, 120–1, 138, 156, 174, 183 ‘The Wages of Sin’ (Clifford), 143–4 themes, 2, 58, 66 titles, appropriation, 83–4 toys, visual, 153, 158–9 trade Almayer’s Folly, 43–4 as basis of political power, 46–7 China, 43 and friendship, 57 importance of, 46 international, 44 and political fortune, 42 traders, 45–6 European private country, 54–7 travels, 7 Travers, Mrs Edith, 94 treason (derhaka), 79–80 Trocki, Carl, 108–9, 111 trust, 78 in senses, 160 truth, 148–9, 183, 188–9 Conrad’s, 176 as dialogic relation, 8 and lies, 38 and perception, 152–8 photographic and journalistic, 152–8 as relative, 5, 9 subjective, 150 and vision, 160, 165–6 visual, 151 ‘Tuan’, 75–6 Turnbull, C.M., 107 twilight, 104 ‘Twixt Land and Sea, 54–5, 57, 131, 146, 171 unbelievers, and believers, 100, 103 understanding, nationalist, 16–18 Unfederated Malay States, 81

unprotected states, 83 Unwin, Fisher, 2 values, Victorian, 132–3 Van Wyk, 166–7 vassal states, 49 Vaughan, J.D., 107, 116 Victorian values, 132–3 Victory, 3–4, 32, 109, 147, 164, 184–6 virtual rule, 74–5, 87–8 vision, 5–6, 9, 11 Conrad’s attitude to, 150–2 Conrad’s scepticism, 176 as cultural construct, 149, 154 in culture, 150 as deceptive, 151, 185 distorted by colonialism, 171–2, 174 fallacy of, 170 hallucinated, 26, 105 magical, 21, 27 Marlow’s, 179–81, 183 mechanical looking, 154 narrative, 28 as preoccupation, 147–8 rhetoric of, 150 subjective, 151–2, 154 and truth, 160, 165–6 white man’s, 159–62 visual culture, 6 visual loophole, 189 visual metaphors, 157 visual, versus textual, 158–9 visuality. see vision Vlekke, Bernard, 56, 84 VOC (Dutch East India Company), 55–6, 110, 112 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 21 Wang, 107, 109, 117–19, 147, 164 Watts, Cedric T., 68, 71 wealth, importance of, 60 weaponry, and power, 57 Whalley, Captain Harry, 12, 45, 51, 160 exploits, 166–7 eyesight, 165–6 fallacy of vision, 170 view of sea gypsies, 169

236

Index

white man’s vision, 159–62 white rajahs, 83 whiteness as construct, 109 as spectacle, 185 wholeness, binary discourse, 132 Wilkinson, R.J., 16 Willems, 122, 130, 132, 139–40, 143 Winstedt, R.O., 16–17 Within the Tides, 114 Author’s Note, 10 worlds

imaginary, 2–3 variability, 12 writer, task of, 27–8 Yang di-Pertuan (‘he who is made lord’), 74–81 Yen Ching-hwang, 107–8 Yeo Kim Wah, 81 Young, Gavin, 139 Youth, 32, 57, 97, 151, 157–62, 165–76, 179–81, 183 ‘Youth’, 7, 178–81, 183 Author’s Note, 13

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