|
By Andrea White, California State University at
Dominguez Hills
Linda Dryden, Joseph
Conrad and the Imperial Romance. New York: Macmillan Press,
2000. xii+228 pp.
In Joseph Conrad
and the Imperial Romance, Linda Dryden argues that Conrad’s
early Malay stories subvert the romantic imagination so abundantly
expressed in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adventure
and imperial romance fiction. Through his negative depictions of
imperial intruders, Conrad’s work undermines fictions that
told so well the story of England’s will to imperial domination,
Dryden claims.
In so doing, she convincingly illustrates
the many ways in which Conrad’s works borrow plot, characterization,
and local colour details from the romance tradition, and how, in
so closely resembling those predecessors, Conrad makes his criticism
clear. Not only has there been a severe falling off, the near similarity
suggests, but the imperial cause itself also looks a much shabbier
affair than the heroic adventure advertised in the imperial romance.
Dryden bases her argument on only two of the
“Malay Trilogy” novels, Almayer’s
Folly and An Outcast of the
Islands. Although she refers to The
Rescue in passing and presumably omits it because of its
later date, some discussion of its exclusion would have been helpful.
And again, while she includes “Karain,” she says very
little about “The Lagoon.” Another surprising omission
is Romance. That the debunker
of romantic ideologies undertook to write one is worthy, at least,
of comment.
These cavils aside, I found that her argument
about these selected early Malay fictions – Almayer’s
Folly, An Outcast of the Islands,
“Karain,” and Lord Jim
– engages an interesting discussion of nineteenth-century
romance, and makes good use of a wide range of sources from Ballantyne
to Stevenson, from Cooper’s Chingachgook to Haggard’s
Allan Quatermain and Kipling’s Kim,
in order to expose the tensions “between the romantic imagination
of the past and the modernist sensibilities of the present”
(199).
Through abundant comparisons, Dryden places
Lord Jim and the other Malay
fictions squarely within the romance tradition in order to show
how aberrant Conrad’s protagonists are. That neither Almayer,
nor Willems, nor Lingard, nor Jim, holds a candle to the heroes
of Kingston, Ballantyne or Haggard, leads Dryden to conclude that
in Conrad’s view, there is no place for the idealist in the
modern world; rather “heroism” has undergone a re-definition
in Conrad’s early fiction where it exists only “in the
performance of the prosaic tasks of everyday life” (198).
The treatment of “Karain” as romance
is particularly illuminating. In comparing it to Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter, Dryden
notices that both foreground the past and submerge in shadow the
present, “as the romance rises dream-like from the imagination
and takes on a palpable air of reality” (113). While, Dryden
argues, “Karain” is “a deliberately conceived
romantic narrative” whose exoticizing elements were aimed
directly at Blackwood’s
conservative audience, it nonetheless “contains hints of the
deep scepticism and plurality of meaning that are the distinctive
features of later works such as Heart of Darkness” (135).
Another useful aspect of this study, was Dryden’s
discussion of the nineteenth-century notion of the English gentleman,
its pervasiveness in the period’s writing and its role in
the imperial romance of the day. She introduces the discussion in
her first chapter, “Making the Imperial Hero,” and makes
use of it throughout most instructively, particularly for the light
it casts on Jim and the questionable status of the phrase “one
of us.”
The idea of the English gentleman as chivalric
knight, largely constructed early in the century and instilled by
public schools, constituted a code that all imperial romance heroes
followed, she argues, and served to legitimize the endeavour. However,
while the ideal imperial hero was an English gentleman honourably
engaged in a divinely sanctioned quest, the protagonists of Conrad’s
Malay fiction – Almayer and Willems, especially – are
significantly off the mark.
Although Jim’s self-identifies as an
English gentleman, to a contemporary audience his behaviour exposed
him as a betrayer of the code and a fraud. Those “gentlemen”
Brown and Jones constitute direct repudiations of the code and expose
the imperial endeavour as the illegitimate and intrusive enterprise
it actually was. Furthermore, Dryden contends, Conrad’s treatment
reveals that the “idea of the English gentleman and the romantic
illusions of imperial heroism are insubstantial because they are
rigid codes of conduct and ideas imposed from without. A moral grounding
is required for such notions to have real meaning” (149).
The discourse of the imperial romance that
assimilated chivalric ideology also constructed hierarchies of gender
and race, although the scope of this study allows Dryden to indicate
only the direction rather than deeply develop it. As she points
out, manly knights need submissive, pure, and deserving ladies,
particularly those clearly depicted as Anglo-Saxon and thus superior
to the native Other.
Those signifiers of feudal superiority –
Jim and Jewel as “the knight and his maiden” –
were also signifiers of whiteness but worked as such only in such
constructed utopias as Patusan, and only temporarily. In all these
ways, Dryden captures the modes in which Conrad’s early Malay
fiction expresses a scepticism about the imperial venture and the
code of the gentleman that underlay it, certainly a contrary spirit
to that of his age.
Illustrations, unusual in a scholarly text,
aid this project. Dryden includes a number of Victorian pictorial
imaginings of the heroic endeavour that effectively complement her
discussion of verbal discourse. The frontispiece is especially significant.
It is a reproduction of Millais’s 1870 painting that depicts
Raleigh as a boy listening with rapt attention to a sailor telling
of the faraway places he has seen and pointing towards them beyond
the horizon with his outstretched arm.
In his Ideology
of Adventure, Michael Nerlich speaks of the glorification
of adventure in the early modern period and the creation of the
Merchant Adventurers of London, an exclusive trade union that assimilated
chivalric ideology and increasingly imaged expansion and conquest
in noble and divinely sanctioned terms.
It would seem that a knightly ideology has
informed English adventuring, in and out of romance, for hundreds
of years and not merely decades. Perhaps Millais was familiar with
Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations,
Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation
(1589) and read there Raleigh’s words, “To seek new
worlds for gold, for praise, for glory,” a credo for Elizabethan
merchant-adventurers, but also for the Victorian explorer-adventurers
celebrated in the pages of Henty, Ballantyne, Haggard, and others.
It is this glorified tradition of adventure and its depiction in
the imperial romance of the day that, Dryden’s study argues,
Conrad renounces in his early Malay fiction.
© 2005 Andrea White
|