Said & Conrad
To begin to inquire into 'why' Said was so attracted to Conrad – why, in Said's own words, 'Over the years I have found myself writing about Conrad like a cantus firmus, a steady ground bass to much that I have experienced' (qtd. in 'Traveling' 283) – is to encounter almost immediately a bewildering super-abundance of narrative and material options. Among the most powerful of these is a narrative Said himself had come to strong terms with by the end of his life: one predicated on the idea of exile, on a vocabulary of displacement and disorientation, marginality and mobility, experimentation and alienation, filial foreclosure and affiliative compensation, that connects his formative experiences and Conrad's, and offers up a distinctive note that links each man's sensibility.1
In a momentous passage from the introduction to Reflections on Exile (2002), Said explains Conrad's seminal place in the expressive history of not only his own writings but those of others of exiled and displaced experiences:
The greatest single fact of the past three decades has been, I believe, the vast human migration attendant upon war, colonialism, and decolonisation, economic and political revolution, and such devastating occurrences as famine, ethnic cleansing, and great power machinations... Exiles, émigrés, refugees, and expatriates uprooted from their lands must make do in new surroundings, and the creativity as well as the sadness that can be seen in what they do is one of the experiences that has still to find its chroniclers, even though a splendid cohort of writers that includes such different figures as Salman Rushdie and V.S Naipaul has already opened further the door first tried by Conrad. (xiv)
Yet if Said is among those pulled to Conrad through this general prism of exile, there are also specific historical continuities between Conrad's native Poland and Said's Palestine that reinforce and multiply their bond. The two erased homelands, fiercely contested from within and densely cathected with symbolic and ideological freight from without, offer a symbiosis that no doubt provided Said special access to those aspects of Conrad he was among the first to emphasise: the 'presentation' of imperialist aggression; the romance of 'Lost Causes'; the power-knowledge relations of Western epistemological systems and records; the instrumentation of imperialism through systems of culture; the 'irreconcilable antagonisms' that dialectically and irrefragably underlie human affairs.2
Once one starts looking, there are in fact extensive relations of continuity and correspondence – e.g., of sceptical temperament,3 multiply duplex identity, technical virtuosity, sensory and experiential insistence, institutional suspicion and resistance, simultaneously experimental and preservationist impulse, and more – that run between Said and Conrad, all of which can become a bit overwhelming, as each additional increment of consideration contributes a new and vital thread to a web of continuities that seemed so self-sufficiently woven the moment before.
It is only recently, for instance, in light of Said's final book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) – a posthumous collection of lectures specifically addressing 'American humanism' and the state of the humanities in the United States, where 'I have lived for the majority of my adult life, and for the past four decades... have been a practising humanist, a teacher, critic, and scholar. That is the world I know best' (1) – that it becomes explicitly apparent how important Said's U.S. location may have been to his investments in Conrad. The tenacity and compulsiveness with which Said returns to Conrad during his forty years of writing, it now seems especially clear, has been powerfully informed by the resonant analogy between Conrad's living near the centre and as an alien subject of the 19th-century British Empire, and Said's similar circumstances at the metropolitan centre of the latest Empire on which the sun perpetually rises.
The idea of the cantus firmus, however, is predicated on not sympathy but rather counterpoint. Consequently, amid the vast tissue of intertwining correspondences that together make for a sort of 'common ground' between Said and Conrad – such that Said can say: 'You know, there are two great presences in my life intellectually: one of them literary, which is Conrad, the other one musical, which is Bach. With Conrad, of course, it's the whole: I don't know a better, more encyclopedic description of the world from which I come than is provided by Conrad's novels ('Traveling' 291) – we are wise to consider, apropos of Bach, the Said/Conrad relation from a contrapuntal point of view. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said glosses the contrapuntal as
a musical form... employing numerous voices in usually strict imitation of each other, a form, in other words, expressing motion, playfulness, discovery, and, in the rhetorical sense, invention. Viewed this way, the texts of the canonical humanities, far from being a rigid tablet of fixed rules and monuments bullying us from the past... will always remain open to changing combinations of sense and signification; every reading and interpretation of a canonical works re-animates it in the present, furnishes an occasion for rereading, allows the modern and the new to be situated in a broad historical field whose usefulness is that it shows us history as an agonistic process still being made, rather than finished and settled once and for all. (25)
I quote this passage at length because even though it does not explicitly refer to Conrad at all, it not only articulates a conception of the contrapuntal that helpfully frames Said's relation to Conrad (curiously recursive but also subversive, studied yet free, multi-vocal but not unison); it also exemplifies their contrapuntal relation. Consider, for instance, that from the perspective of 'strict imitation' and precise engagement, it is difficult to imagine a more Conradian passage than one that (a) prioritises music above all other arts (see NN ix); (b) walks a fine line between deep and disciplined attention to the 'rules and monuments' of the past and the need ultimately to abandon them to pursue 'the stammerings of [one's] own conscience' (NN x-xi); (c) recognises, in the words of Conrad's very famous letter to Barrett Clark on May 4, 1918, that 'a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion', the more so 'the nearer it approaches art' (CL6 210-11); and (d) insists, as Conrad does in one of the most famous letters of them all, that history and its interpretation are processes of ever-ongoing, agonistic 'irreconcilable antagonisms' (CL2 348).
Yet at the same time, this hyper-Conradian passage – this passage which, 'in the rhetorical sense', could very well be described as 'invented' by Conrad insofar as it has little vocabulary not heavily pre-articulated and mediated by him – never would or could have been written by Conrad himself. Its immediately and aggressively didactic purposes; its interventionist political spirit; the kind of leftist, anti-nationalist, and anti-imperialist politics on which its is predicated and that it extends; even the utopic conception of the university that is its animating circumstance – all these are not simply a departure from Conrad; they are the positive and counter-pointed undoing of premises as fundamental and integral to Conrad's writings as the ones Said extends.
There is, then, a curious doubleness in Said's negotiation of Conrad that is its own kind of 'irreconcilable antagonism': an intimacy so fundamental that even when Conrad is not intended, he is implicitly and extensively evoked; and at the same time, a distance so pronounced that Conrad's very limitations and opposition seem to offer up the foundational opportunity through which the signature elements in Said's voice, values, and vision emerge and define themselves.
It is no coincidence, then, that many people who are not Conrad or anglo-postcolonial literary scholars are surprised to discover that Said wrote his first book on Conrad – and generally assume that to the extent Said's work bears relation to Conrad at all, it is one of repudiation. This is not the product of not knowing Said well, so much as knowing half of him too well. Similarly, Said's own interpretations of Conrad are continually – paradigmatically, I would say – couched in a rhetoric of division that replicates the duality of his own overarching stance toward Conrad.
For example, Said's major arguments concerning Heart of Darkness and Nostromo – the two Conrad texts he admires most consistently and keenly – are each presented in terms of 'two visions' at work 'in' those novels, one predicated on all the objective and subjective processes of Eurocentric imperialist ideology which those books are unsparing in their critique but to which they are nevertheless limited, the other predicated on the limitlessly contingent worlds in which the 'story' is and can be told, to which the books point and invite re-writing but about which the books remain silent and blank.4
So too, in a slightly different key, the 'Presentation of Narrative' essay in The World, the Text, and the Critic turns on the element of contingency that runs throughout Conrad's fiction: each story (in one way or another) carefully set and situated in the circumstances that give rise to its articulation (if only in the Author's Note), precisely to emphasise the tremendous discrepancy between the invariably elaborate 'tale' that finds itself presented for certain listeners, and the vast swathes of occluded reality and voice that are kept outside the charmed circle of speaker and listener (90-100).
Even Said's own meta-critical reflections on the relationship between himself and Conrad take on a divided and conflicted character that is greater than the sum of the irreconcilable parts. Within the span of two pages, for instance, having described Conrad as 'one the two great presences in my life intellectually' ('Traveling' 288); having praised Heart of Darkness as 'the most uncompromised, unafraid confrontation with the irrational and the unknown – in every sense of the word: political, psychological, geographical, cultural – that there has ever been' (288); and having championed Nostromo for its 'relentlessly open-ended, aggressively critical inquiry into the mechanisms and presuppositions and situatedness and abuses of imperialism' and for 'a profound urge to get to the bottom of things' (289), all of which clearly and deeply capture Said's sympathy, he can also say:
Edward Said: And yet – and this is the other part of it now – I have a feeling that Conrad and I would never, could never be friends!
Peter Mallios: Why?
ES: Well, I think he's really the opposite of me in many ways. I mean, he's a man who believes in no political action. I think he thought it was all vain, and that's, of course, what's going on in his discussions with Cunninghame Graham, who is the opposite. That is to say: I am the Cunninghame Graham figure in the model, rather than Conrad. But you need a Conrad, I think, to have a Cunninghame Graham – that's the whole point. I've often felt that Conrad would have deeply disapproved of everything I did. ('Traveling' 290)
The analogy of Cunninghame Graham, the one friend with whom Conrad may have had the truest5 line of communication, is revealing – and we will return to it in a moment. Here, though, an important point to consider is that there may be an element of over-determination in the aggressively contrapuntal stance Said assumes toward Conrad: whose form is all too frequently the irreconcilable poles of absolute vision and sympathy on the one hand and complete blankness and blindness on the other. Consider, for instance, Said's eloquently dual description of Heart of Darkness.
Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow's tale in a narrative moment that he allows us simultaneously to realise after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history, was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history, one just outside the tightly exclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie. As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty. (Culture 24)
Conrad was 'so self-conscious' – indeed, 'What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that... he was so self-conscious about what he did' (23) – that he is able to point to the very vast historical vistas that his culturally-determined and equally absolute blindness force him to leave 'empty'. Similarly, Heart of Darkness, despite its 'immensely compelling' (23), 'remarkably disorienting' (29), and unstintingly relentless (29-30) critique of Western imperialism and its Eurocentric apparatuses, cannot see beyond an imperialist frame, cannot recognise that what it registers 'as a non-European 'darkness' was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence' (30).
Benita Parry, in a recent essay that may inaugurate a sea-change in contemporary criticism on Heart of Darkness, has explicitly challenged this view of 'Conrad's 'Africa' ' as 'a world immutable and epistemologically empty' (41), arguing that in its self-conscious gaps, repeated expressions of bewilderment, and signature hermeneutic breakdowns, 'the book alludes to a reality that lies beyond its own epistemologically constrained field of vision' (50), registering Africanist contact and inviting postcolonial re-writing.
I would add, moreover, on the model of Melville's Benito Cereno – where the emphasis falls on the white narrator's perceptual limitations in direct relation to the agency and intelligence of the subversive black characters – that the scene that Marlow describes as 'quite a mutiny', where after much verbal abuse from Marlow the impressed African slaves run the hammock carrying Marlow's sickly 'white companion' into a bush (HD 71-72), and also the scene in which the 'screeching', abused, and unrepentant African slave burns down the Central Station's grass shed (76-78) – these seem to me, whether Marlow understands this or not, very plausibly readable as precisely Conrad's recognition and disclosure of the 'non-European darkness' as 'in fact a non-European world' very intelligently and deliberately 'resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence'. My point, though, is not to open and enter the very complicated, important, and probably irresolvable issues of the degree and manner of Heart of Darkness's investment in racism and imperialism, nor to quarrel with Said on a point (Parry's and mine) that I suspect he would acknowledge (for it is one of degree and subtlety), and which indeed seems to me not only in the general spirit of but ultimately made possible by the 'second vision' he observes in Heart of Darkness. My point, rather, is the element of categorical over-determination that finds repeated articulation, like a cantus firmus, in Said's baseline formulations of what Conrad can and cannot see.