Ideas of Identity in Joseph Conrad and Alun Lewis
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‘Slaves of the Successful Century ’? Ideas of Identity in Joseph Conrad and Alun Lewis Stephen Hendon January 2010 UMI Number: U584467 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U584467 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 DECLARATIONS AND STATEMENTS This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed D ate.......... This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. Signed ...... D ate......... This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. Signed Date I'i ~L&( O I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed D ate........ CONTENTS SUMMARY i INTRODUCTION 1 REVIEW OF THE CRITICAL FIELD 8 Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness 8 Alun Lewis: ‘The Orange Grove’ and the Welsh Postcolonial Debate 24 CHAPTER 1 - BIOGRAPHY AND CULTURE 40 Joseph Conrad 41 Alun Lewis 60 Conclusion 79 CHAPTER 2 - CIVILIZING THE NATIVES: ANGLICIZATION 82 Henry M. Stanley:Through the Dark Continent 84 Joseph Conrad: The Nigger o f the "Narcissus ” 96 Alun Lewis: ‘Almost a Gentleman’ 112 Lily Tobias: ‘Glasshouses’ 119 Alun Lewis: ‘They Came’ 128 Conclusion 135 CHAPTER 3 - DECONSTRUCTING IDENTITY: THE SUBALTERN VIEW 138 PART 1: IMPERIAL IDENTITY 139 Rudyard Kipling: ‘Slaves of the Lamp (Part II)’ 140 Rudyard Kipling: ‘A Sahibs’ War’ 148 Joseph Conrad: Heart o f Darkness 154 Alun Lewis: ‘The Raid’ 168 Alun Lewis: ‘Ward “0 ”3(b)’ 175 PART 2: GENDER IDENTITY 183 Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness 186 Rudyard Kipling: ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ 198 Alun Lewis: ‘The Housekeeper’ 209 Conclusion 222 CHAPTER 4 - CULTURAL TRAFFICS: HYBRIDIZATION 226 Joseph Conrad: Heart o f Darkness 228 Joseph Conrad: ‘The Secret Sharer’ 255 Alun Lewis: ‘The Orange Grove’ 267 Alun Lewis: ‘The Jungle’ 287 Conclusion 301 CONCLUSION: ‘THE TRUEST EYE’ 304 BIBLIOGRAPHY 318 SUMMARY This thesis is postcolonial in approach, and comparative in method. It examines a number of texts by Joseph Conrad and Alun Lewis, authors who, because of their origins - respectively, Polish and Welsh - were ambivalently associated with the dominant discourse of imperialism. Their occupations - Conrad was a merchant seaman, Lewis an Army officer - implicated them in regimes that regarded them as ‘Other’. Their narratives represent insider- outsider positions that are pertinent to the periods of imperial uncertainty in which they were written: in Conrad’s case, at the fin-de-siecle , and in Lewis’s, in the 1930s and 1940s. The principal stories examined are Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , and Lewis’s ‘The Orange Grove’, both of which have biographical bases. Following a Review of the Critical Field, Chapter 1, ‘Biography and Culture’, discusses the displacements of the authors’ upbringings and subsequent careers, including Conrad’s employment with an imperial trading company in the Congo, and Lewis’s position as a soldier in war-time India, showing how this biographical and colonial context informs the authors’ works. Chapter 2 begins the comparative analyses, including consideration of texts by other writers. It concerns the potentially ‘enslaving’ effect of pedagogical discourses of Anglicization. Texts by the Welsh-bom explorer, Henry M. Stanley, and the Jewish-Welsh writer, Lily Tobias are compared to Conrad’s novella, The Nigger o f the “Narcissus ”, and two stories by Lewis. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on texts that deconstruct the fixities of imperial and gender identity by means of performative narratives. Through comparisons with stories by Rudyard Kipling, it is demonstrated that Heart of Darkness and Lewis’s ‘Indian’ texts increasingly represent complex ‘double narratives’ of empire. These chapters address issues of hybridization, irresolvable identity, and migratory ‘statelessness’, concluding that the writings of Conrad and Lewis illuminate conflictual, modem ideas of identity. 1 INTRODUCTION Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was published in book form in 1902; its main setting is the Congo. In the same year, the Encyclopcedia Britannica summarized the provisions of the International Conference held in Berlin in 1884-85 which formalized the relations of the colonizing European Powers with distant regions of Africa. The Britannica emphasizes through the language of control the wide-reaching power of nineteenth-century imperialist discourse. In its entry for ‘Congo Free State’, it records that: [a] Conventional Basin of the Congo was defined [and in this Basin] it was declared that “the trade of all nations shall enjoy complete freedom .” Freedom of navigation of the Congo and all its affluents was also secured , and differential dues on vessels and merchandise was forbidden. Trade monopolies were prohibited, and provisions made for civilizing the natives} According to the Encyclopcedia Britannica , the Congo is outside the ‘all nations’ regime; its ‘state’ needs to be defined, and, thus, its natives need to be ‘civilized’ so that European trade can thrive. However, some individuals involved in the ‘civilizing’ process, then and later, themselves lacked definition. Joseph Conrad and Alun Lewis are cases in point. Their origins were marginal to empire. Conrad was a Polish emigre, exiled by the effects of Russian imperialism. He found a ‘home’ in Britain through his career in the imperialist trade of the British Merchant Marine. Subsequently naturalized as British, he had, r\ perhaps, benefited from assimilation to a stable society; yet, he was often regarded as ‘alien’. Lewis, the Welsh poet and short story writer, was a British Army officer in the Second World War, but also a native of a ‘peripheral’ country that had experienced a history of internal 1 The New Volumes o f the Encyclopcedia Britannica Comprising, in Combination with the Existing Volumes o f the Ninth Edition, the Tenth Edition o f that Work (London and Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black; New York: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, 1902), Volume III, forming Volume XXVII of the Complete Work, pp. 200-207 (p. 201); (my emphasis). 2 Norman Sherry has noted the way in which some critical reviews that were contemporaneous to Conrad’s writings emphasized the author’s ‘foreignness’; see Norman Sherry (ed.), Conrad: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1973), pp. 25-26. An unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement of 20 September 1907 concerns Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent (1907); in the review he is described as ‘this alien of genius’; ibid., pp. 184-185. 2 colonization, 3 and he too was made to feel ‘alien’ by fellow officers. However, Wales’s position vis-a-vis British colonialism is fraught with paradox, for it could be argued that the nation had benefited from centralizing social improvements that developed from imperialist commerce. A similar argument was put forward to justify the European powers’ ‘freedom’ to trade in the Congo, a freedom that had the consequence of enslaving the native population. It is the context of Wales as a nation, with a culture and language that distinguishes it from other ‘peripheral’ British regions,4 which renders the idea of social improvement particularly complex. As Ned Thomas has argued, the introduction of ‘better’ facilities, such as Anglicizing education systems, impinged on ‘a special kind of [national] consciousness’; the particularities of a ‘shared’ Welsh past were thus made subaltern to the British perspective.5 The effects of social change were significant in terms of the relationship of the Welsh to British imperialism and will be discussed in Chapter 1, ‘Biography and Culture’. As, in the twentieth century, colonial power began to wane, the inconsistencies in the case for imperialism became more noticeable. The poet Idris Davies, a contemporary of Lewis, bore witness in his work to the decline on the home front during the Depression. He conveys vividly the idea that the effects of internal colonization were as prohibitively ‘defining’ as those described by theEncyclopcedia Britannica in respect of the Congo. In his poem, ‘Gwalia Deserta’ (1938), the speaker depicts the human consequences that arose when the industry which had been introduced to Wales in a ‘beneficial’ process became redundant: 3 Michael Hechter, in Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), sets out a social ‘model’ which he terms internal‘ colonialism’, and relates it to Wales. In this model, the ‘core [...] dominate[s] the periphery [and] exploits] it materially’, resulting in inequities of ‘resources and power’; see pp. 8-10; (original emphasis). Wales, as peripheral to the imperial ‘core’ in London, may thus be regarded as an example of the model in that its natural resources, coal, for instance, were so exploited. As Chris Williams notes, ‘Welsh economists, historians and sociologists have found Hechter’s analysis unconvincing’: alternative terms, such as ‘dependent periphery’, have been suggested as more relevant to Wales (see Chris Williams, ‘Problematizing Wales: An Exploration in Historiography and Postcoloniality’, inPostcolonial Wales, ed. Jane Aaron and Chris Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005, p. 8). Further research is required in respect of the way in which the idea of Wales as an internal colony is represented in literature, although that is not the purpose of this thesis.