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Conrad's Modern Nomads The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of English CONRAD’S MODERN NOMADS A Thesis in English by Sevda Altinkaynak Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May, 2005 The thesis of Sevda Altinkaynak was reviewed and approved* by the following: Sanford Schwartz Assoc. Professor of English Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee John Harwood Assoc. Professor of English Linda Woodbridge Professor of English Abdullah Yavas Professor of Business Administration Robert Caserio Professor of English Head of the Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Conrad juxtaposes Western culture with its native counterpart in order to formulate a vision that can guide the alienated individual who has lost his connection with his own nature, his family, and his society. Unlike many of his contemporaries who only describe this miserable human condition, Conrad offers guidance to rehabilitate the individual. His presentation of Western and native cultures focuses on their practices of cultural ritual, game, and gender relationships. His target is the Western mind, which needs to be decolonized by being reminded of the fundamental equality of all human beings. Once such a bond between the white and the native is established, each can learn and benefit from one another. His heroes who have come to accept the fundamental equality of all human beings are capable of achieving peace and tranquility in their lives. As a result of their interactions with the natives they are able to cherish a sense of belonging and sharing that can repair the damage caused by their painful experience of alienation. By marrying to the members of the native cultures, Conradian heroes and heroines learn how to exist as both individuals and social beings. A mutually respectful and complementary companionship between a male and a female becomes the backbone of a society of emotional solidarity and shared meaning Conrad . Conrad’s female characters, especially those who are exposed to injustices and exploitations, play a very crucial role in the establishment of such a society. They are strong and capable enough to decenter the self- evidence of the binary opposition between the male as the superior and the female as the inferior. They bring balance not only into social environment but also into the power struggle between cultures. Conrad’s juxtaposition of the native woman’s presence and active participation in social life against the complete exclusion of the Western woman from social life is the most significant binary opposition he points out between the West and the native. Although Coppola bases his Apocalypse Now upon Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and announces the end of Western civilization once patriarchal and imperialistic ideologies become invincibly dominant, he cannot see that Conrad offers a solution to prevent this undesirable end. Conrad’s remedy is that once the male and the female can relate to each other without engaging in a power struggle, they will be able to taste peace and happiness. This mutual and complementary relationship becomes the symbol of the social order Conrad’s art encompasses. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Part One: I) Conrad the Philosopher 26 II) Conrad and His Critics 29 III) The Alienated Soul 43 Part Two: I) Modern Versus Native 91 II) Cultural Ritual 103 III) Game Playing 137 IV) Companionship: A Taste of Paradise 166 Conclusion 201 Notes 217 Bibliography 223 Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on former 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. JOSEPH CONRAD, Notes on Life and Letters To my Daughters Marwah Banu and Bushra Begum Khalak INTRODUCTION The critical background of Joseph Conrad’s work supports his contention that books have their own fate, sharing with man “the great incertitude of ignominy or glory--of severe justice and senseless persecution--of calumny and misunderstanding-- the shame of undeserved success.”1 The following quotation , one of the most popular twentieth-century interpretations of Conrad’s work, demonstrates the latest stage his books have reached, following the direction this indefinite fate has allotted for them: Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could clearly see that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that ‘natives’ could lead lives free from European domination. As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them.2 Although Edward Said seems to appreciate Conrad’s “severe critique of imperialism,” he still accuses the novelist of prejudice against the natives. According to Said, Conrad could not accept that natives were capable of establishing themselves as independent nations, free from European dominance. In the same article, Said concludes that Conrad is “a Polish expatriate, who became the employee of the imperial system.” One of Said’s contemporaries, Chinua Achebe, sharing the same view, takes this 2 criticism to an extreme and classifies Conrad as “a racist who totally dehumanized Africa’s native population.”3 Disagreeing with Said’s and Achebe’s remarks, this study centers its argument on the notion that Conrad felt the urgent need for an alternative social structure and found it within the native cultures he had come in contact with. He knew that the Western social system was deteriorating drastically. He foresaw that the end of European imperialism was imminent because of its oppressive and dehumanizing practices towards its own members as well as others. He was not nostalgic in his effort to find an alternative. Since he did believe that the past had been the source of the present chaos, he turned to other cultures for help and guidance. His theme was as old as human existence, “finding some form or perhaps only some formula of peace and happiness,” and yet, his solution was revolutionary and unprecedented. This remarkable prospect is prevalent in Conrad’s work. A historical overview of the era in which Conrad took up his literary career explains the reasons for the extra care and caution Conrad observed while putting forth his alternative. His stories deal with the issues of social justice, equality, and peace, at a time when the most dominant Western overseas practices were racism, colonialism, and expansionism. He was aware of the fact that most of his fellow citizens would be unable to comprehend his ideas fully or to deal with them accordingly. Such racist and expansionist practices implanted in the minds of most Europeans fear and hatred against the unknown other-- the natives of Africa, or of any non-European land--by means of certain institutional tools such as schooling, military training, and literature. For Conrad, to express his approval of cultural exchange between the white men and the natives, let alone his 3 approval of miscegenation, in such a biased environment would have been professional suicide. In his Colonizing Egypt, Timothy Mitchell explains how this imperialistic agenda was successfully carried out in Egypt.4 He describes the training process by which the Western mind was prepared for the ultimate mission of colonizing the Egyptian land as well as the Egyptian mind. The second part of Mitchell’s book is about the way these preprogrammed Western minds established similar institutions in Egypt to brainwash the Egyptians to accept their own inferiority and white supremacy as facts. In his Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi Thiong’o, talks about a similar process carried out by the West in the other parts of Africa.5 In the midst of these racial and imperialistic practices, Conrad introduced a vision that crossed over the racial and cultural divides by telling the truths about bigotry and its effects upon the minds of both the colonized and the colonizer. According to Zdzislaw Najder, “Conrad thus anticipated the reversal of the relativistic trend in cultural anthropology and the revival of universalism.” He furthers his discussion by claiming that Conrad’s multiculturalism--but not moral relativism--was a result of his “declared and deeply ingrained belief in the fundamental equality-not sameness!-of all human beings.”6 Najder believes that in Conrad’s writings there is a paradoxical reversal of this formula. His insistence on the fact that all human beings are culture-bound is his way of rebutting relativism-on its ground. For him [Conrad] territoriality means the vast geographical panorama of cultural variety amongst human beings, and it is bound with the ensuing indigenousness of morals. He presents 4 behavior as explicable within its proper cultural context, but evaluated on a common human scale. Whatever the colour of their skin, his protagonists are presented as responsible moral agents. (Najder, 6) The formula Najder mentions here is the prevailing attitude of Conrad’s time: the more cultural variety, the more moral relativity. Conrad knew that the possible outcomes of such relativism would be either the sense of racial and cultural superiority or cynicism. If everything is relative, the idea of having principles and values will be irrelevant. Conrad’s sincere presentation of characters from different cultures and races as good and evil, noble and despicable, indicates that he did not follow the traditional attitude towards the “Other.” His moral horizon went beyond class and cultural boundaries. Najder finishes the first section of his article with a statement that reinforces the argument of this study: “For Conrad, women and men of all territories, of all cultures, are capable of fidelity and honour, love and sacrifice, and can serve, in their specific ways, his valeurs ideales” (Najder, 7).
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