Joseph Conrad’s Travel Stories Weren’t Black and White

The Polish British author Joseph Conrad is widely known for his 1899 story Heart of Darkness, which is set in the colony of the Belgian Congo. But his seafaring profession also took him on extended voyages to Southeast Asia, a region that provided him with ample inspiration, and a setting that recurs in his works. In these writings, literary critics have noted, Conrad put into practice a philosophy of using art for “bringing to light the truth” and “mak[ing] you see,” as Conrad described his craft.

“Conrad’s Malay fictions have received serious attention mainly in the context of novels of imperial romance and adventure,” literary scholar Gene M. Moore writes.

But Moore argues that Conrad’s stories deliberately include a darker side to the depiction of European colonists and travelers as “fair-haired, clad in white clothing, and often showing as radiant specks against dark backgrounds.” Even as their physical appearance contrasts blindingly with the “formless blackness” of night, as Conrad describes a scene in one story, Moore finds that these characters are also symbolically blind to the humanity of non-white counterparts—including enslaved people.

Since the European colonists are focused on the distinction between white and non-white people, “the institution of slavery in the Malay world remains largely beneath the white man’s notice… because it is not based on racial difference or skin color,” Moore explains.

For example, Captain Lingard—hero of three novels and likely inspired by the “White Rajahs” in Sarawak—is incredulous when asked by a Malay character whether a crewman was a slave. Protesting that his ship “is an English brig,” he declares the sailor a “free man like myself.”

“Conrad’s white protagonists have a vested cultural interest in ignoring or overlooking the problem of slavery,” Moore observes. That’s as some of the characters “tend to treat all non-whites more or less as slaves anyway, and thus blind themselves to the extent and importance of slavery as both an economic and a social fact of life in the East.”

Moore believes that Conrad’s Southeast Asian stories set out “to bring to light a ‘complete picture’ of rebellious maritime peoples rendered invisible by the forces of empire.”

“The intention is moral as well as visual, not to suppress what cannot be understood but to highlight the ‘redeeming points’ of sea-robbers as fellow men (and women) who followed the call of the sea,” Moore writes.

The British also feared becoming “decivilized” from their imperial contact with far-flung areas. Robert McGill argues that Conrad’s writing depicts colonialism’s uneasy encounter with foreign parts, which Victorian culture associated with disease and contamination. For example, in The Shadow-Line, which is also set in the Malay Archipelago, the narrator finds a photograph of a ship’s captain with a woman in “semi-oriental” attire and says in parentheses that he “(…even threw it overboard later).”

These punctuation marks, according to McGill, are a form of “textual quarantine” that restricts the reader’s contact with “any sort of representation of the ‘uncivilized.’”

Still, Conrad’s prose shows that there’s no escaping exposure to contaminating elements. McGill notes that, as “a polyglot English writer of Polish descent with experience overseas and a penchant for writing out of that experience,” Conrad too was seen as an agent of infection. In response, Conrad embraced the rhetoric of contamination and degeneracy, “suggesting his own refusal to compartmentalize or disinfect.”

“Although Conrad’s characters occasionally rehearse the rhetoric of Victorian contagionists,” McGill writes, “the inevitable permeability of borders in his fiction renders that rhetoric futile.”

At the same time, translator and novelist Tiffany Tsao highlights the darker side of the role of “the artist as an explorer of the universe” in Conrad’s work. She interprets the portrayal of adventurers in the 1900 novel Lord Jim as “a eulogy for the ideal of the noble and Quixotic scientific exploration,” which is tainted by colonialism.

One major figure in Lord Jim is the entomologist Stein—a character inspired by the real-life naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who recounted his voyages in The Malay Archipelago. The more Stein examines specimens—from insect samples to the titular Jim himself—the more the scientist gains “heightened awareness of the awe-inspiring and perplexing nature of the organism before him” and seeks “to uncover still more mysteries,” according to Tsao.

But the celebration of exploration is accompanied by Conrad’s acknowledgment that such feats are “too often hand-in-hand with exploitation and domination,” she adds. As such, the ideal mode of scientific exploration presented by Conrad appears to Tsao to be inherently imperialist. “In order to remain in constant motion and avoid stagnation, science must have perpetual access to unexplored and untrammelled regions.” she writes.

Given that the globetrotting Conrad aspired to base his art on principles of scientific representation, this relationship between science and empire casts a pall over his work. In fact, Conrad had a reputation as “one of the notable literary colonists,” as one reviewer described him, and he himself called the act of writing “conquest of a colony.”

Academic Clive J. Christie has weighed in on how British writers talked about travel in Southeast Asia in the “era of colonial retreat” during the early to mid-twentieth century.” He draws a distinction between “exoticist” writers like Conrad who “set out to evoke an ‘atmosphere,’” and the more scientifically minded authors of “essential guides…which had a sober scientific purpose.”

Yet, upon reflection, Conrad might well have been attempting to do both tasks at once—treading a fine line, and, judging from scholars’ long-running debates, succeeding.

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