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Article Excerpt
That Joseph Conrad continues to exert considerable influence on postcolonial discourse is unreservedly acknowledged today. Positing the notion of a "postcolonial/postmodern space," this paper proposes to explore the problematic of racial, cultural, and sexual identity in Conrad's first two novels, Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), treated dismissively by early critics of Conrad's work. The concept of a postcolonial space functions on at least three levels in this project. Firstly, it denotes the literal and metaphoric odyssey of the author who writes back from the periphery to the centre, deconstructing empire in the process of representation. Secondly, it acts as a "space-clearing gesture" (Appiah 63), or theoretical space to interrogate Conrad in the light of some of the most pertinent concerns of modern literary discourse, namely, issues of racial, ethnic, and gender subjectivity. Lastly, it postulates an indeterminate, interstitial "third space" of intervention (Bhabha 38), between the over-determined formulations of the East/West binary, and the traditional humanistic readings of the writer's work inaugurated by F. R. Leavis in 1948.
The thinking of Rene Descartes in the sixteenth century is viewed as the critical point from which the notion of space moved from a mathematical, sensory construct to a mental and social one. With the advent of Cartesian logic, which came to include both the Subject and the Object (I think, therefore I am), space came to dominate all senses and all bodies. Hence the modern field of inquiry known as epistemology has inherited and adopted the notion that the status of space is that of a mental thing or mental space.
Henri Lefebvre has posited the problematic of spatiality as one that is comprised of questions about mental and social space, about their interconnections, about their links with nature on the one hand and with pure forms on the other. The idea of a postcolonial "space" proposed in the title of this paper has been appropriated from Homi Bhabha, who has coined the term "postmodern space" as a mode of intervention into cultural identification, in the "negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, opening out, remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference--be it class, gender or race" (219). Such assignations of social differences--where difference is neither one nor the other but something else besides, an in-between--find their agency in a form of the future where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, Bhabha suggests, an interstital future that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present.
What warrant can there be for us in the twenty-first century to consider a dead white Eurocentric male, whom Chinua Achebe, famously if not notoriously, labeled a "thoroughgoing racist" in 1975 and a "bloody racist" in 1977 ("An Image of Africa: Racism," 257; "An Image of Africa," Conrad 124)? The remit for such a study comes from the theoretic space of postcolonialism, which is traversed by the language of postmodernism and poststructuralism. The social theorist Edward Soja has argued that while terms such as postmodernism and postmodernity remain controversial and confusing at times, they now seem appropriate ways of describing our contemporary cultural, political and theoretical structuring, and of highlighting the reassertion of space that is complexly intertwined with it (5). Achebe's counter-reading of Conrad almost thirty years ago inaugurates the antithetical space in which Conrad is interrogated by a postcolonial critique that writes back to the empire. Adopting Achebe's critical stance, several scholars, including Marianna Torgovnick and Padmini Mongia, have articulated positions that view Conrad as an unmitigated racist and sexist. (1) If Leavis and his acolytes represent one theoretical space of reading Conrad, and if Achebe represents an antithetical space of interrogation, then Conrad has to be mediated from a third space, a liminal space of contingency and contiguity.
Henry Louis Gates asserts that in much of canonical literature, race has been an invisible quantity (2). The growth of canonical literatures was coterminous with the prominence of the New Criticism and Practical Criticism of the early twentieth century. Gates problematizes the relationship between race, which he regards as the trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, and the aesthetics of New Critical thought as follows:
How did the pronounced concern for the language of the text, which defined the Practical Criticism and New Criticism movements, affect this category called race in the reading of literature? Race, along with all sorts of other "unseemly" or "untowards" notions about the composition of the literary work of art, was bracketed or suspended. Within these theories of literature to which we are all heir, texts were considered canonical insofar as they elevated the cultural; [...] One not heir to these traditions was, by definition, of another race. (3-4)
A brief overview of seminal criticism on the writer's early works might help to contextualize this paper. It would be interesting, if not instructive, to see what Leavis has to say about Conrad's two early novels, remembering that it was he...
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