Imperialism as Metaphor in Joseph Conrad's Fiction (Southeast Asia).

Abstract

The dissertation defines Conrad's imperialist world as a metaphorical milieu in which idealism wages a losing battle against reality, and examines writing as Conrad's way of sublimating the ostensible defeat into a rewarding experience. Conrad's active life was dominated by two empires, Russian and British. Whenever his pursuit of humanitarian ideals was challenged by the obstacles and dilemmas of the imperialist world, Conrad surmounted the difficulty by resorting to abstraction rather than following a suicidal course of action as his patriotic ancestors and relatives had done. Both his choice of an exiled life in the West, and his retreat into the contemplative and imaginative world of writing were measures of abstraction employed to transcend the life of action that always has a way of compromising the purity of ideals. The pattern governing Conrad's personal growth is carried on and repeated in his creative life. The pattern is most visible in works dealing with imperialist experience because in essence these works record the metaphorical conflict between the actual and the ideal. When observed in chronological order, his depiction of a colonial world manifests an increasing degree of abstraction, schematization and intellectualization. If personal, emotional, and sensory emphases dominate the first colonial novels, social, historical, typological and representative interests prevail in the later works. The increased intellectual control, however, does not necessarily represent Conrad's sense of mastery over reality as the subject of art. In Victory, which I view as Conrad's concluding statement about the imperialist world, the mockingly detached and ossified form lays bare the unbridgeable gap between human consciousness and the truth of life. Human rationality and its idealistic beliefs emerge as opaque and self-contained structures. Confronted with this epistemological uncertainty, the peculiar br and of Conradian idealism does not lapse into cynicism, but embraces subjectivity and its beliefs as the only knowable and therefore meaningful reality.