Timothy Mos Man Sundae and other overseas workers

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Agnes Smedley– the Fellow-Traveler’s Tales

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Approaching Conrad through Theory: 'The Secret Sharer'

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Three Ways of Going Wrong: Kipling, Conrad, Coetzee

This investigation of the theme of 'going wrong' in colonial discourse examines two Indian stories from Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. A myth of empire is identified in the transgressive figure of the man who jeopardizes his own people's identity and prestige by becoming too closely involved in 'native life', and on his relationship with a second, more law-abiding figure who forms a misgiving bond with him. It is argued that the tension and the kinship between these figures of law and transgression indicate a fault-line in the nature of empire itself.postprin

Louise Ho and the local turn: the place of English poetry in Hong Kong

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Orwell and Kipling: Global Visions

This essay argues for a close relationship and intriguing similarities between George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling, writers a generation apart, who are usually thought of as occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, with Kipling’s wholehearted conservative belief in the British Empire standing in contrast to Orwell’s socialist hatred of the same institution. Yet these two great writers of fiction and journalism have much in common: born in India into what Orwell called “the ‘service’ middle class”, both had their political and intellectual formation in the East. Empire made Kipling proud and it made Orwell ashamed, but their imperial experience overseas gave both of them a global vision, which each in turn tried to share with their readers at home who understood too little, they felt, of Britain’s global responsibilities (Kipling) or her reliance on a “coolie empire” (Orwell). This essay examines the global vision of both writers, and the highly partial perspective conferred on it by the optic of empire. It does so by looking at two journalistic or “travel writing” texts about other people’s empires: Kipling’s account in From Sea to Sea of a visit to China in 1889, and Orwell’s essay “Marrakech”, written during his stay in French Morocco in 1938-39.postprin

The Secret Secret Sharer

"The Secret Sharer", written in 1909 in a respite from the composition of the novel that was to become Under Western Eyes, is one of Conrad’s most straightforward as well as one of his most popular stories. It moves steadily forward to an exciting narrative climax, and more or less observes the classical unities of action, time and place. The consensus of the large critical literature it has engendered is that the tale’s centre of gravity lies in the relationship between the two parties to the “secret sharing” of the story: the young captain, poised uncertainly on the threshold of his first voyage in command of a ship, and Leggatt, the fugitive murderer whom he takes on board, hides in his own quarters without the knowledge of his own crew, and eventually helps to escape. This relationship is based on an intuitive and romantic kinship each feels for the other, which is another meaning of the title phrase “the secret sharer”. The tale is narrated as a retrospect by the young captain himself, and critical opinion also agrees in seeing in him an example of the Conradian “unreliable narrator”. This paper argues that the young captain is in some crucial respects a great deal more unreliable than has been noticed hitherto. In doing so, it reveals more than one more layer of meaning in the tale’s cunning title, and shares at least one more vital secret, buried in the story by the narrator because he too is unaware of it.postprin

Not knowing the Oriental

This paper marks the twenty-fifth year of Edward Said's Orientalism by reconsidering the knowledge/power paradigm that has dominated much thinking about colonial discourse after Said. In addition to cases of ‘sublime' ignorance, when the Orient was felt to be too vast, daunting and mysterious ever to be contained by western knowledge, there were also moments, and even strategies, of prophylactic ignorance, in which the western observer stepped back from venturing into the hinterland of Oriental experience, for fear of being overwhelmed, contaminated, compromised, assimilated or consumed. In such cases, colonial authority depended on not knowing too much. The theme of colonial ignorance is pursued in an investigation of one of Said's prime witnesses, the Earl of Cromer, for twenty-five years de facto governor of Egypt, whose authoritative Modern Egypt insists nonetheless that ‘the Egyptian Puzzle' must remain insoluble by the Englishman. The argument here is that this is a strategic ignorance that protects or insulates the Englishman's power. The second part of the essay turns to Rudyard Kipling's Indian fiction, in which knowing the Oriental is a glamorous but dangerous pursuit. Kipling's policeman hero Strickland seeks insider knowledge to increase his power over Indians, but in doing so he jeopardizes the distance on which his difference from them, and authority over them, depends. This compromises his status with both Indians and his fellow British. Sometimes it is ignorance of the Orient that secures power. Kipling's colonial characters are frequently caught in this dilemma – knowledge of the Oriental is dangerous, but ignorance is insupportable.postprin

'A Fraud Called John Buchan': Buchan, Joseph Conrad and Literary Theft

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Conrad and the Comic Turn

Conrad and the Comic Turn This essay argues for the neglected importance of forms of popular theatre, and especially music-hall, for Conrad’s education in English culture, and for the style of comic situations, and comic dialogue, in his fiction. The early novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is shown to be particularly imbued with memories of the music-hall, in its theatrical topography, its crew who are both audience and participatory chorus of the main drama, and in its dramatically-lit cynosure Wait. “An Outpost of Progress” is examined as a variation on the “turn” of comic pals, and for its elements of slapstick farce. Versions of theatrical comic sketches are found embedded other fictions, including profoundly tragic ones, such as The Secret Agent. Finally, music-hall’s adeptness at creating comedy and evading censorship and censure through the use of innuendo, suggestion, irony and double entendre is found often to be a principle of Conradian dialogue and even narration, in such stories as “Heart of Darkness”.postprin