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Elective Affinities: Edward Said,Joseph Conrad, and the GlobalIntellectualFakrul Alam aa University of Dhaka , BangladeshPublished online: 21 Dec 2012.

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Studia Neophilologica 85: 95–105, 2013

Elective Affinities: Edward Said, Joseph Conrad, and theGlobal Intellectual

FAKRUL ALAM

From the time he pursued graduate studies at Harvard in the 1950s to his final years,Edward Said compulsively read and wrote about Joseph Conrad. As this essay explores,the affinities that drew Said to Conrad originated in the complex ways in which politics,geography, and history impacted on both men’s lives as an exile. Strikingly similar in placeswhile elsewhere notably divergent, Conrad’s and Said’s respective conceptual frameworkscentred on a shared set of political and aesthetic problems. Said, it is argued, saw in Conradthe archetypal political exile and victim of dislocation, and mined his works, both fictionaland critical, for exemplary depictions of the ravages wrought by imperial conquest and forhis own highly influential views on the nature of exilic consciousnesses.

For almost fifty years, Edward Said publicly engaged with the work of Joseph Conrad.In his memoir Out of Place (1999), Said described how at the beginning of his academiccareer he had found Conrad’s works formidable, but that with hindsight Conrad had clearlybeen immensely important for his intellectual trajectory. While pursuing graduate studiesat Harvard in 1956, he recalled, he had read “Conrad, Vico, and Heidegger, among othergloomy and severe writers” at a time of great personal stress after his father was diag-nosed with cancer. Yet each had “since remained a strong presence in my intellectual work”(Said 1999, 256). In his Introduction to Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2001), Saidexplained Conrad’s formative influence somewhat differently: “I found myself drawn quiteearly to writers like Conrad, Merleau-Ponty, Cioran, and Vico who were verbal techniciansof the highest order and yet eccentric in that they stood apart from, and were untimely,anxious witnesses to, the dominant currents of their own time” (Said 2001, xxi). In hislast published work, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004b), Said again referredin passing to Conrad in order to stress that for a “humanist” no author should be “com-pletely sovereign or above the time, place, and circumstances of his or her life”: “[To]read an author like Conrad, for example, is first of all to read his work as if with the eyeof Conrad himself, which is to try to understand each work, each metaphor, each sen-tence as something consciously chosen in preference to any number of other possibilities”(Said 2004b, 62).

These hints at a lifelong engagement with Conrad’s writing are confirmed by a surveyof Said’s major works, which reveal him as continually writing and reading about Conradbut also as revaluing the novelist in relation to his own evolving political consciousness.In what follows, I will examine Said’s many readings of Conrad in an attempt to tracethe latter’s impact on a leading literary critic/theorist of our times, and, in the process,to identify the implications of their relationship for students of Conrad, theory, criticism,and narrative poetics. Not least, I will seek to shed light on the “elective affinities” thatdrove Said to return so obsessively to Conrad. In the process, I also hope to show how thetransnational nature of Conrad’s life and works played a major role in Said’s transformationinto an outstanding global intellectual.

Said’s studies at Harvard resulted in his first full-length book, Joseph Conrad and theFiction of Autobiography (1966). Essentially an examination of Conrad’s shorter fiction

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in the light of his correspondence, the book uses a phenomenological approach to accessthe distinctive elements in Conrad’s writing. Said presents Conrad’s writing as an attemptto weave narratives out of “uncertainty about himself” by someone who felt fragmentedby being “so many different people, each one living a life unconnected with the others”(Said 1966, xx). Writing was thus a mode of self-fashioning for “a self-conscious foreignerwriting of obscure experience in an alien language” and struggling to forge a career anda style “through pain and intense effort” from the experiences of a life of adversity andexile (Said 2008, 4). Conrad’s writing, notes Said, “ . . . was not just mastery of a craft, butsomething more primal and profound, it was maîtrise de conscience,” and his technique akind of “savoir faire” (Said 2008, 27).

As a literary critic, then, Said saw Conrad as drawing upon both an immense uncertaintyabout himself – “a stunted, incomplete legacy of national identity, dissipated in an obscureand chaotic life” (Said 2008, 18) – and the tension generated by his abrupt switch fromsailor to novelist. Uncertainty generated by statelessness and a feeling of professional pre-cariousness led to narrative uncertainty: the narrative tone of Heart of Darkness is broodingbecause it rests upon the premise that the truth about the world or a character ultimately“cannot be apprehended directly as a whole object of knowledge” (Said 2008, 35), and thatthe act of narration itself is an immensely demanding and even frustrating process. As aresult, Conrad’s works are necessarily “enigmatic and inconclusive” (Said 2008, 49).

Said’s second major work, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), was also his firstmajor contribution to literary theory. Conrad was inevitably a major presence in a studythat identifies “beginning” as a willed departure. Said sees the Polish-British novelist asan archetypal modern writer in having abandoned his home and embraced exile, in beingfascinated by characters who voyage into the unknown and who leave their places of ori-gin, and in seeking to force his readers out of their comfort zones into a recognition of theheart of darkness at the core of “civilization.” Giving only fleeting attention to Marlow’sCongolese adventure in Heart of Darkness – its experimental and disorienting “narrativeframes” designed to depict “the strangeness of experience” (Said 1975, 3) – Said insteadfocuses upon Nostromo. Conrad’s South American epic strikes him as worthy of analysisin a study of origins and difference because of how it develops characteristics discerniblein Conrad’s other fiction, notably a “strangeness of idiom and intention” (Said 1975, 110),and reflects Modernism’s penchant for “willful beginnings” and of “action of a mastering,conquering kind” (Said 1975, 119). The latter phrase shows Said inching toward a read-ing of Conrad that would soon lead him into colonial discourse analysis. Said’s interest inconnecting the act of Modernist narration to the problematics of identity is here comple-mented by an implicit critique of a Western will to dominate and exploit in the service ofwhat Conrad famously called “material interests”.

Said’s next book, Orientalism (1978), the first of a trilogy dedicated to critiquing themisrepresentations of other peoples, made a searing indictment of the scholarly field ofstudy identified in the title and the discourse which it spawned. In it, Said makes a passingreference to Conrad in the context of a discussion of the kind of sexual license taken byGustave Flaubert in depicting the Egyptian dancer Kuchuk Hanem, which reminds Saidof Flaubert’s influence on the portrayal of the seductive and dangerous Alma in Conrad’sVictory (1915). Said’s implication is that Conrad continued a Western novelistic tradi-tion, initiated by successive colonial encounters, which resorted to stereotyping the East;clearly, even the most conscientious of writers could not escape the discursive effects ofthe Orientalist tradition. Another passing comment in Orientalism suggests that Said wasbecoming increasingly interested in the phenomenon of what is essentially imaginativegeography and its seemingly irresistible appeal to the European mind – Marlow’s maps ofthe Congo and books of African adventure in Heart of Darkness. For Said, such fantasy-driven, discourse-generated attraction to other lands led to the exploitation of the earth’sresources and the domination of other cultures. No less suggestively, Said made passing

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reference to Kurtz, suggesting that T. E. Lawrence resembles the “European” “idealist” ofConrad’s novella who had once harboured grand intentions of reshaping other countries.Venturing out on “civilizing missions”, such adventurous do-gooders mired themselves inmoral darkness.

Said again invoked Heart of Darkness, briefly yet significantly, again in The Question ofPalestine (1980):

Conrad makes the point better than anyone, I think. The power to conquer territory is only in part a matterof physical force: there is a strong moral and intellectual component making the conquest itself secondaryto the idea, which dignifies (and indeed hastens) pure force with arguments drawn from science, morality,ethics, and a general philosophy. . . . the “idea” always informing the conquest, making it entirely palatable.(Said 1980, 77)

Clearly, Said by this point saw in Conrad not only an archetypal modern, obsessed withthe kind of narrative self-fashioning that follows from a feeling of exile and alienation, butalso someone who presciently depicted fantasies of possession and control generated by awill to dominate that had been initially stimulated by Orientalist discourse.

In a chapter of The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) titled “Conrad and thePresentation of Narrative,” Said appears to have shifted his focus away from Conrad’sexposé of colonialist acquisitiveness and of the Western will to dominate and exploit othersin the guise of “civilizing” missions. In this essay on the novelist’s narrative technique, Saidagain links the experimental nature of writing to Conrad’s self-consciousness about writ-ing in English and his awareness of the sheer impossibility of articulating one’s intentions,fully and imaginatively, through writing. This, Said avers, led Conrad to stress hearing andtelling, and the use of multiple narrators. Echoing Conrad’s famous pronouncement in hisPreface to the Nigger of Narcissus, Said notes: “Conrad’s goal is to make us see, or other-wise transcend the absence of everything but words, so that we may pass into a realm ofvision beyond the words” (Said 1983, 95).

While “Conrad and the Presentation of Narrative” scanted the kind of colonial discourseanalysis with which Said had become associated after Orientalism, he returned to a post-colonial reading of Conrad in Culture and Imperialism (1993). In it, he discusses Conrad’scrucial role in any examination of the nexus between culture and imperialism in our time,singling out the novelist for his “prescience” in “forecast[ing] the unstoppable unrest andmisrule” in Latin American republics (Said 1993a, xvi). Said is emphatic that the issuesraised by Nostromo are by no means out of date, as the United States, while putting on ashow of benevolence, continues to strive to dominate the politics of these countries for itsown interests. Culture and Imperialism also makes Conrad “the precursor” of a thrivingtradition of (mis)representing the so-called “Third World” in travelogues, films and sup-posedly scholarly studies by “theoreticians and polemicists whose specialty is to deliverthe non-European world either for analysis or judgment or for satisfying the exotic tastesof European and North American audiences” (Said 1993a, 8). As Said sees it, Conrad’sstance on colonization is uniquely ambivalent: “Conrad was both anti-imperialistic andimperialist, progressive when it came to rendering fearlessly and pessimistically the self-confirming, self-deluding corruption of overseas domination, deeply reactionary when itcomes to conceding that Africa or South America could ever have had an independenthistory or culture” (Said 1993a, 8). However, Said provides a defence for Conrad: whilein many ways an apologist for imperialism whose fiction abundantly evinces racist ten-dencies and the “paternalistic arrogance of imperialism” (Said 1993a, 8), Conrad hadthe foresight to see that the Kurtzes and the Goulds of this world always fail, necessar-ily proving the self-destructiveness of their delusions. Conrad, Said concludes, is to beappreciated for his insight that imperialism is a system, and a violent, inhuman one atthat. His blindness towards some aspects of imperialism can be excused, unlike those of

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creative writers, filmmakers and scholars “in the age of decolonization and after Fanon”(Said 1993a, 8).

Said adumbrates on these motifs in greater detail in Culture and Imperialism, scru-tinizing the assumption that the contemporary intellectual has to reexamine canonicalauthors such as Conrad in the light of the works of Franz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, ideasabout global capitalism propounded by theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein, AntonioGramsci’s classic accounts of hegemony, and Michel Foucault’s theories of discursive for-mation. Indeed, Said offers nothing less than a method of postcolonial reading, stressingthe contemporary relevance of writers such as Conrad and Kipling for whom he advocatesa “polyphonic” mode of analysis that draws on leftist intellectuals so as to give “a reviseddirection and valence” to their works (Said 1993a, 67). Put differently, Conrad works set inAsia and Africa can now be tied to the discourse of imperialism that was implicit in earlierwritings. However, it is important to stress their relevance after the onset of decoloniza-tion, recent developments in theory, and the emergence of oppositional criticism. In thisFoucauldian vein, Said quotes from Conrad’s A Personal Record in order to make thefollowing point: “One must connect the structures of a narrative to the ideas, concepts,experiences from which it draws support. Conrad’s Africa, for example, comes from ahuge library of Africanism, so to speak” (Said 1993a, 57, emphasis in original). In a sense,then, Culture and Imperialism is Orientalism updated, for the book was surely written tohighlight the kind of cultural neo-imperialism that Said had neglected in the earlier work;hence the far greater attention devoted to Conrad in it.

In the 1990s, as he became increasingly disenchanted with the Middle East peaceprocess, Said began to pay more attention to the plight of the dispossessed people ofPalestine, stressing their rights as well as the predicament and mindset of exilic peopleseverywhere. And yet even when writing his mostly polemical essays on topical issues, col-lected in The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination1969–1994 (1994), Said kept coming back to Conrad, his percipient fiction, and hisarchetypal characters. When Israeli novelist Amos Oz callously declared that he lookedforward to seeing Jewish settlements in Occupied Palestine becoming Central European“enclaves”, Said found himself thinking about “the surrealistically white-suited accoun-tant in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, who sits amid the ‘great demoralization of the land’in darkest Africa, going through a Londoner’s routine” (Said 1994a, 34). In an importantessay titled “Identity, Negation and Violence”, he invokes Conrad’s The Secret Agent asa context for illuminating terrorism in ways that the popular media will not. Later in thesame essay, while discussing “some of the ways in which all nation states regulate publicdiscussion and identity and enforce consensus” by inter alia a process of “othering”, histhoughts turn instinctively to Gould and Kurtz – archetypes of “enlightened” Westerners“capable both of civilizing and obliterating the natives” (Said 1994a, 354).

Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (2001), the last essay col-lection that Said published during his lifetime, includes two papers that deal directly withConrad. The first, “Conrad and Nietzsche,” discerns an insight shared by the philosopherand the novelist into how “the Will” always inclines to power, this being the reason whymen like “Kurtz, Gould, and Nostromo were nothing if not willful and deliberately egoisticoverreachers” (Said 2001, 70). The two men also share an “obsession” with finding a wayto make the multiple experiences of one’s past come together in the present (Said 2001, 74),a frustration at “the inability to be exact” at the point of articulation, and an understandingof how “plural meanings are generated at that point” (Said 2001, 76). Heart of Darknessappears Nietzschean to Said in how all these aspects coalesce in Conrad’s narrative to offera “scenic design for utterances delivering and withholding ‘original’ truths” (Said 2001,76). The other essay, “Through Gringo Eyes: with Conrad in Latin America,” variouslyelaborates upon Said’s insights in Culture and Imperialism into the uncanny manner inwhich Costaguana anticipates the Latin American “Banana Republics” of our neo-imperial

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age. Said reiterates his view that Conrad is ambivalent in his portrayal of imperialism:the important difference between Conrad’s imperialist tendencies and contemporary rep-resentations of the region is that the novelist, despite holding the prejudices of his age, hadcensured “the evil and utter madness” of imperial systems wearing the mask of altruism,and of reflected idealism gone awry (Said 2001, 278). New to this essay, however, is a com-parison of Conrad’s treatments of the Congo (in Heart of Darkness) and South America(in Nostromo), the former, as Said sees it, being associated with “elemental darkness” andthe latter with “scattered and incomplete” histories (Said 2001, 279). Also new is the waySaid detects in Conrad’s depiction in his imperial narratives the “commodity fetishism ofimperial adventurers” (Said 2001, 280).

One other essay in Reflections on Exile warrants consideration in any study of Said’s fix-ation with Conrad. The titular essay, “Reflections on Exile”, broods on how the experienceof exile can be enabling as well as disabling, and on how one negotiates oneself in an era ofexile. Said makes Conrad’s novella “Amy Foster” (1901), whose protagonist is as autobio-graphical as any in Conrad’s fiction, resonate significantly for those familiar with his ownas well as Conrad’s life and works. Conrad’s protagonist Yanko Goorall, a shipwreckedCarpathian passenger who lands on the coast of Britain, haunts Said because “Conrad tookthis neurotic exile’s fear and created an aesthetic principle out of it” (Said 2001, 180). Theonly difference between Conrad and Yanko, Said implies, is that the novelist ultimatelymade a home for himself in his writing, while Yanko remained “fragile and vulnerable”(Said 2001, 184). In this apparent paralleling of Conrad’s fate with his own, Said offers aglimpse of the elective affinities by which he found himself drawn to the novelist again andagain.

In an interview with Peter Lancelot Mallios just before his death, Said remarked that“over the years I have found myself writing about Conrad like a cantus firmus, a steadyground bass to much that I have experienced” (Mallios 2005a, 283). Said adds that, as anundergraduate at Princeton, he was “completely wiped out” by his exposure to Conrad’sshorter fiction and stayed up nights “trying to figure out what it all meant” (Mallios 2005a,283). Doing so, he recalled, made him discover that Conrad’s fiction registers “a constantsense of being invaded by outside forces,” bringing the realization that the novelist’s per-sonal dislocations had made him the chronicler of an unsettled world (Mallios 2005a, 283).At one point in the interview, Said reveals that he is attracted to Conrad because he, too,has this profound sense of being unsettled, so much so that he feels that he has nowherecome across “a better, more encyclopedic description of the world from which I come thanis provided by Conrad’s novels” (Mallios 2005a, 289). In an earlier interview with ImreSalusinszky, Said had confessed that when he first encountered Conrad as a teenager, hehad an uncanny feeling that “I was reading, not so much my own story, but a story writ-ten out of bits of my life put together in a haunting and fantastically obsessive way” (Said2004a, 75). In another interview, with Tariq Ali, he revealed that the more he read Conrad,the more he felt that the novelist “was answering to some very deep affinity that I feltwith him” (Ali 2005, 61). Interestingly, Said explained to Ali that from the beginning hewas drawn to Conrad’s voice and mode of storytelling because “the speaking voice is aforeign voice, in Conrad” (Ali 2005, 62). Like Conrad, Said had clearly experienced thekind of dislocation that occurs during imperial adventures, and the way in which imperialdo-gooders can destroy others even as they compromise themselves. Clearly, he, too, hadlong had to negotiate his own foreignness in a strange land.

At one point in the interview, Mallios perceptively suggests that one cannot think ofConrad and Said without considering the novelist as “a fellow writer – as a kind of secretsharer” of the critic (Mallios 2005a, 263). Reading an essay like “Return to Palestine” (col-lected in The Politics of Dispossession), Mallios adds, instantly recalls Conrad’s “PolandRevisited” (Mallios 2005a, 295). Indeed, this combination of politics, geography, and his-tory in the mindset of the exilic writer offers a cogent explanation for why Conrad remained

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a constant in the many lists of intellectual influences which Said offered interviewers. (Inthis particular interview, his list comprised only two men: Conrad and Bach!)

Reading the opening chapter of Jeffrey Meyers’s Joseph Conrad: A Biography (1991),one thus immediately discerns why the novelist was “the ground bass to much” that Saidexperienced. His life and character – and, we can add, writings – were as profoundly shapedby the troubled political history of Palestine, as Conrad’s were by Poland. While Conradleft Poland after his father’s “thwarted political idealism” made it impossible to continueliving there, Said left Jerusalem, first, after his father, a rich businessman, moved his familyto Cairo, and, then, after he was sent to a school in the United States because living inJerusalem was no longer an option for his family. (Said’s father was an American citizen.)It is clear, however, that the two men shared a history of loneliness at the formative stagesof their growth and a profound sense of loss of homeland that stayed with them all theirlives. Said, indeed, told Tariq Ali that being sent to America at the age of fifteen, “severedfrom everything I knew and everything I liked” was “the most shattering experience” ofhis life and one from which he never “really recovered” (Ali 2005, 33–34).

Both Conrad and Said were witnesses to the “endless martyrdoms” of their people toregain national independence and the kind of “thwarted political idealism” (Meyers 2001,1) which Meyers has identified in Conrad’s father. Poland’s political and intellectual eliteleft their country for a life of exile; Palestine’s elites have dispersed diasporically over theworld. Conrad’s birthplace, the Polish Ukraine, consisted of an “ethnically heterogeneoussociety” that gave him “a multi-lingual capacity and a cosmopolitan outlook” (Meyers2001, 11); Said was similarly multilingual, and Palestine no less heterogeneous. As manycommentators have noted, Said thrived in New York, one of the world’s most cosmopolitancites. The one fundamental difference between the two was that Conrad, refusing to fol-low his father’s urging never to abandon their country, opted for voluntary exile and onlyreturned once to Poland after becoming a writer, whereas Said was a frequent visitor to theMiddle East.

Both Conrad and Said have recorded their anguished responses to the division and occu-pation of their countries. Three essays in Conrad’s Notes on Life and Letters (1928) areespecially relevant to the present enquiry into the roots of the affinities that made Conradso compelling a figure for Said. The first of these, “The Crime of Partition” (1919) is abitter reflection on the lust for “plunder” and “the act of mere conquest” that led to thedivision of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century: “the untold sufferings of a nationwhich would not die was the price exacted by fate for the triumph of revolutionary ideals”(Conrad 1928, 56). Conrad’s indignation at the continuous dismembering of his country isobvious, as is his scorn for the “criminal” countries that carved up his nation – “the crimebeing the murder of the State and the carving of its body into three pieces” – but he alsonotes the “awe and strange uneasiness in the hearts of the unlawful possessors” (Conrad1928, 66). Writing in 1919, Conrad makes it clear that he will never condone the actions ofthose Poles who see the partition of their country as a fait accompli. His anger is also obvi-ous when he describes what he saw as a journalistic conspiracy of silence: “Almost withoutexception the Press of Western Europe in the twentieth century refused to touch the Polishquestion in any shape or form whatever” (Conrad 1928, 78). Conrad’s resentment of thepowerful international players who had truncated Poland, occupied it for generations, andzealously sought to preempt moves by Poles to reunite is evident in his acerbic comment:“From the same source no doubt there will flow in the future a poisoned stream of hintsof a reconstituted Poland being a danger to the races once so closely associated withinthe territories of the Old Republic” (Conrad 1928, 68). The whole scene was nothing lessthan a “cynical and sinister farce” staged by “brazen” and “vile manifestos” issued by theEuropean Powers. The only hopes lay with “the spirit of Polonism, which, having been afactor in the history of Europe and having proved its vitality under oppression, has estab-lished its right to live” (Conrad 1928, 68). Any future independent Polish state must come

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to terms with these “Powers” by living with them in peaceful co-existence: “The onlycourse that remains of a reconstituted Poland is the elaboration, establishment, and preser-vation of the most correct method of political relations with neighbors to whom Poland’sexistence is bound to be a humiliation and an offence” (Conrad 1928, 72).

In “A Note on the Polish Problem” (1916), Conrad also reflects solemnly on the fate ofhis people, condemned by geography and history to be the victims of the great powersthat surround them during a “hundred years of ruthlessly denationalizing oppression”(Conrad 1928, 76). And yet, continues Conrad, “the absorption of Poland is unthinkable”(Conrad 1928, 68). “Polonism,” the spirit of Polish national identity, has survived Germanand Russian aggression and cynical Austrian posturing, but, despite their overt and covertantagonism, what could an independent Poland do except coexist with its three domineer-ing neighbours? “That advanced outpost of Western civilisation will have to hold its groundin the midst of hostile camps: always its historical fate” (Conrad 1928, 77).

In “Poland Revisited” (1915), the third of the essays collected in Notes on Life andLetters, Conrad records with quiet eloquence a visit to his country, after many years ofexile, during the outbreak of the First World War. Originally planned as a family holiday,the visit became mired in the chain reaction that began with the assassination of ArchdukeFerdinand in Sarajevo. Conrad movingly describes the emotions evoked by his return toCracow, “the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen months of his life”(Conrad 1928, 94). In this old royal and “academical [sic] city” he had “began to under-stand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund of sensations withwhich I was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated existence” (Conrad1928, 81). However, Conrad situates his journey and the emotions it evoked in the contextnot only of his time in Poland but also of the intervening years, during which he found hisvocation, first as a mariner and then as a writer. Even so, the emotions that overpower himas he juxtaposes the past and the present crystalize in a recollection of the mourners at hisfather’s funeral: “The dead and they were victims alike of an unrelenting destiny whichcut them off from every path of merit and glory” (Conrad 1928, 94). Later, forced to waitin Poland because of the outbreak of hostilities, he and his family witnessed the enforcedparalysis of an occupied people: “And there we remained amongst the Poles from all partsof Poland, not officially interned, but simply unable to obtain the permission to travel bytrain, or road” (Conrad 1928, 94). In summarizing the “tragic character of the situation”(Conrad 1928, 94) he witnessed during his enforced residence of two months, he described“a whole people seeing the culmination of its misfortune in a final catastrophe, unable totrust anyone, to appeal to anyone, to look for help from any quarter, in the trouble of mindsand the unrest of consciences, to take refuge in stoical acceptance” (Conrad 1928, 94).

Mallios was certainly perceptive in connecting Conrad’s “Poland Revisited” to Said’s“Return to Palestine-Israel”. Indeed, anyone who has read the bulk of Said’s voluminouswritings on the country he left behind, and in which he constantly reflects on the fate of hispeople, will recognize the astonishing similarity between the consciousness of both writers.When Conrad reflects on Poland’s past, present, and future, one cannot help thinking of themany parallels with Said’s thought on the history of his country, its present sorry state anduncertain future. When Said indicts the guilds of “experts” that serve neo-imperial powers,when he draws attention to his people’s endless suffering, when he repeatedly denouncesthe imperial powers for complicity in the division of Palestine and the neighbouring coun-tries who also did their bit to seal the Palestinians’ fate, when he focuses on the loud silenceof the Western media about the fate of those in the Occupied Territories, when he attacksthe cynicism and brutality of Israel and its allies, and when he describes the stasis imposedby Israel upon daily life in Palestine, Said’s works offer a striking parallel to Conrad’sin their tone of bitterness, indignation, and sadness. One finds in them, indeed, emotionsthat are present – albeit in a more muted form – in Conrad’s essays on Poland. However, asConrad did in his own solemn way with the Poles, Said finds cause for hope in the resilience

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of Palestinians who take every opportunity to show their capacity to survive in the face ofthe most daunting obstacles. Like Conrad, who reflected on the future of Poland vis-à-visits relationship with strong neighbours, Said has argued that the future of the Palestiniansdepends on their ability to co-exist with their neighbours in general and with Israelis inparticular. Like Conrad, Said, too, is passionate in believing that what must be resisted atall costs and with any strategy is the “absorption” of his country by the dominant power.

Such personal affinities between Said and Conrad become only more apparent when onestops to think about the remarkable parallels in the lives and works of both writers. Is notwriting a question of self-definition for Said just as much as it is for Conrad? Why else,indeed, is his major book a meditation on beginnings? Does Said, like Conrad, not livemost vibrantly in his writing? In the preface to his first book, Said describes Conrad as“himself so many different people, each one living a life unconnected with others” (Said1966, 4), and, in an interview characterized himself before beginning work on Orientalismas “leading a very schizophrenic life” (Said 2004a, 76), that is, without connecting histwo identities as an academic and a Palestinian-American. When Said lauds “the pain andintense effort” that he regards as “keynotes” in Conrad’s spiritual history (Said 2004a, 76),one thinks immediately of these emotions as they appear in his memoir Out of Place, arecord of his early life and the last decade of his life during which he kept on writingdespite debilitating bouts of chemotherapy. In his book on Conrad, Said lauded the novelistfor having the courage “to risk a full confrontation with what, most of the time, seemedto him to be a threatening and unpleasant world” (Said 1966, 7), and his memoir revealshim as similarly insecure and unhappy yet also brave as a boarding school pupil and, later,undergraduate. What Said admires in Conrad is his “steadily examined commitment” tohis craft (Said 2004a, 115); something similar could be said of his own writing, academicand non-academic alike.

Said’s other publications also offer plentiful material with which to pursue this connec-tion. His image of Conrad as the quintessential modern writer, whose fate is to remain “aman essentially between homes” (Said 1975, 8), echoes Said’s preference for living in arented apartment to owning a house, but one mostly thinks in this connection of Said’smeditation in After the Last Sky on Palestinians living in the shadow of occupation. SuchPalestinians closely resemble the Poles about whom Conrad writes in his three essays onPoland. Dovetailed with photographs by Jean Mohr that help Said’s texts to make us “see”in the Conradian sense, it is a book obviously meant to acquaint readers with the lives ofPalestinians “scattered, discontinuous, marked by the artificial and imposed arrangementsof interrupted or confined space, by the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of dis-turbed time” (Said 1993b, 20). Who is to say that the following line is not from a bookabout Conrad but about Palestinians like those depicted in his book, perhaps even Saidhimself? “For where no straight line leads from home to birthplace to school to maturity,all events are accidents, all progress is a digression, all residence is exile” (Said 1993b,20). Said’s many attempts to highlight the oral storytelling aspect of Conrad’s narrativesand to stress the novelist’s obsession with mise en scène surely have their origins, too, inhis Palestinian consciousness. As Said observes: “The further we get from the Palestineof our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more inter-mittent our presence” (Said 1993b, 34). And what he identifies as the distinctive qualityof Palestinian writing is strongly suggestive of the unique quality he detects in his ownanalysis of Conrad’s style: “The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction isits formal instability. . . . Particularly in fiction, the struggle to achieve form expresses thewriter’s efforts to construct a coherent scene, a narrative that might overcome the almostmetaphysical impossibility of representing the present” (Said 1993b, 61).

As Mallios rightly notes, “Return to Palestine-Israel” has much in common with “PolandRevisited”. In it, Said describes how upon his return in 1992, forty-five years after leavingJerusalem, he had experienced “an odd combination of exhilaration and mournfulness . . .as we visited familiar sites in (which was it mainly?) Israel or a recollected Palestine” (Said

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1994a, 129). The trip to occupied Palestine also brought home to Said, as had Conrad’s tripto occupied Poland, an “eerie finality of a history that looked at me from behind the shadedwindows, across an immense gulf” – one he found himself “unable to cross” (Said 1993b,131). But in the course of the visit, Said discovers a renewed sense of belonging, and ulti-mately leaves with feelings not unlike those of Conrad’s at the end of his visit to Poland in1918: “It was a wonderful, a poignant two months” (Conrad 1928, 19). Nevertheless, thereis a vital difference. Where Said ends on a note of hope for his people, Conrad, ultimatelya pessimist, concludes: “And I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember thatappalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, afigure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: Ruin – and Extinction” (Conrad1928, 94). To put it somewhat differently, Conrad writes like a man resigned to his fate,whereas Said, who took the trip after learning that his time is almost up, refuses to abandonhope for his people.

Despite all the similarities between Said and Conrad – and once one starts thinking aboutthem, they tend to overwhelm one, as Mallios has observed in an essay on the affinitiesbetween the two men (Mallios 2005b, 179) – they were also temperamentally and ideo-logically very different.1 As noted, Conrad left Poland voluntarily, only returning once.After his days as a mariner were over, he opted for an essentially sedentary life devotedto writing. Said, on the other hand, left Cairo because his father wanted him to leave theMiddle East. He became politically active in 1967 after a decisive war led to the occupationof Palestinian territory, and subsequently involved himself with the PLO. He even spent asabbatical year in Beirut in 1972–73. And, as already discussed, he paid a visit to occu-pied Palestine in 1992. While Conrad was deeply pessimistic, Said never inclined to anyposition that refused to look beyond the grim present, and he was, on the whole, willingto challenge anyone and anything in the West which contributed to the repression of hispeople.

These temperamental differences are presumably what prompted Said to tell Maillosconfidently that “Conrad and I would never, could never be friends” (Mallios 2005a, 290).They were, he knew, simply too diametrically opposite on many questions: Conrad did notbelieve in political action and was wary of idealism, and of being drawn into lost causes.Said, by contrast, risked a great deal by becoming an active member of the PLO, and evenconfessed to being addicted to lost causes. Mallios has listed other differences betweenthe two: Said was didactic in a way that Conrad never was; the Palestinian opted for inter-vention and not resignation, was “leftist, anti-nationalist, and anti-imperialist,” and had a“utopian” belief in the university – Mallios is no doubt thinking here of Said’s books onrepresentation of intellectuals and democratic criticism – all positions that would have beenanathema to Conrad (Mallios 2005b, 181). Said, as is well known, urged intellectuals “tospeak truth to power,” “to speak out for” the oppressed, and not only to represent “the col-lective suffering” of one’s people but also to “[testify] to its enduring presence, reinforcingits memory,” and by “universalizing its crisis, to give greater human scope to what a partic-ular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the sufferings of others” (Said1994b, 93–94). Indeed, in his interview with Ali, Said declares unequivocally of Conrad:“His politics are appalling! Actually, the novels that are not centered in the empire [TheSecret Agent and Under Western Eyes] are the least interesting to me” (Ali 2005, 62).

This may explain why Said, especially after engaging with the PLO and the Palestinianintifada, often sounded a polemical and combative tone in his writings absent in Conrad’sessays on Poland. In this period he showed himself to be very focused on Palestinian rightsand a critic of neo-imperialism, while also becoming a kind of global intellectual thatwould not have appealed to Conrad. It is also the reason why Said began writing regularcolumns in Arabic newspapers. As Tom Paulin emphasized in a tribute published on thefirst anniversary of Said’s death, Said “never gave in”, and, indeed, towards the end of hislife, “intransigence” became his favourite word (Paulin 2004). Certainly, it is the dominantmotif of his posthumously published On Late Style (2006). But Paulin sees his elective

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affinity with Conrad, so very different from him, as yet another reason to treasure Said’swork: “Conrad, like Swift, is a conservative anarchist and a major influence on Said, and itis this openness to a point of view that is other than progressive which gives Said’s thinkingand his style its complexity” (Paulin 2004).

Said’s returns to Joseph Conrad throughout his long and distinguished career as a lit-erary critic and theorist, then, offer fascinating insights into the novelist’s works as wellinto his own method and preoccupations. In his writing on Conrad Said revealed the pro-cess of self-fashioning that is one consequence of the writer’s decision to become an exile.In a series of essays, Said brilliantly illuminated Conrad’s style, rhetorical strategies, andthe significance of his extraordinary attention to the narrative mise en scène. At the sametime, he demonstrated how to read Conrad postcolonially and laid bare the novelist’s deepambivalence about empire. Ultimately, Said will remain important for Conrad criticism forhis insight that the novelist’s depiction of the “heart of darkness” in colonial and impe-rial ventures was groundbreaking despite its racist tendencies and recourse to Eurocentricessentializing of other races and peoples.

Said’s voluminous writings on Conrad will similarly continue to be of great relevanceto those interested in evaluating the development of one of the twentieth century’s mostinfluential literary critics and theorists, and in understanding the passion that animated anoutstanding public intellectual and advocate of Palestinian rights. Said’s books and essayson Conrad, and even his passing comments on the novelist, leave no doubt that the novelistwas crucial for the development of his consciousness. They also chart his evolution intoan increasingly fierce analyst of the discourses of imperialism and neo-imperialism, of thenexus between knowledge and power, of the essentializing and stereotyping that enableempire, and of the need for resistance and oppositional criticism. Conrad played a crucialrole in Said’s intellectual formation, particularly his notion of exile as an enabling con-dition for the writer and his attraction to modernity and experimental writing. And it wasConrad’s works, of course, which provoked Said to examine how fiction set outside Europehas historically reflected the nexus of culture and imperialism. Conrad’s exemplary workas a transnational writer, we must conclude, had a decisive influence on Said’s embraceof a career trajectory that made him into one of the pre-eminent global intellectuals of histime.

So long-lasting and intellectually rewarding a connection between a creative writer anda literary critic and theorist is quite unique in literary history. To have located in Conradthe archetypal political exile and victim of dislocation, to have seen in his works a powerfuldepiction of the terrible consequences of the imperial encounter, but also to learn from himhow to reconstruct his own life out of adversity and loneliness through the discipline ofwriting so as to make the world “see” – such were the qualities that Conrad transmitted toSaid. What the novelist had to tell his readers through his fiction is what Said was able todisseminate through his critical prose and theoretical writing. Said’s activism, optimism,and willingness to look beyond his privileged upbringing and the ivory tower in orderto devote himself to Palestinian and other liberationist causes have arguably made himConrad’s most remarkable critic.

Fakrul AlamUniversity of DhakaBangladesh

NOTES

This essay could not have been written without the help of my dear (ex-) students Rubana Huq, HasanAl-Zayed, and Rehnuma Sazzad, and Sohel Choudhury of Friends Books Ltd., Dhaka. Rubana, Sohel, andZayed generously provided me with books, and Rehnuma with materials collected for her own study ofEdward Said. Aali A. Rahman kindly read the manuscript with an editorial eye.

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Studia Neophil 85 (2013) Edward Said, Joseph Conrad, and the Global Intellectual 105

1 Mallios’s essay and interview with Said (Mallios 2005a and 2005b) have proven very helpful in the writingof this paper. For another extensive study of the affinity between the two writers, albeit one centred on Said’sJoseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, see Abidrahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism andSociety (2002).

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Ali, Tariq. 2005. Conversations with Edward Said. London: Seagull Books.Conrad, Joseph. 1928. Notes on Life and Letters. New York: Doubleday.Hussein, Abidrahman A. 2002. Edward Said: Criticism and Society. London: Verso.Mallios, Peter Lancelot. 2005a. “Traveling with Conrad: An Interview with Edward W. Said.” In Conrad in

the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter LancelotMallios, and Andrea White, 283–303. New York: Routledge.

——. 2005b. “Contrapunctus: Edward Said and Joseph Conrad.” In Conrad’s Europe, ed. Andrzej Busza andMarcin Piechota, 177–94. Opole, Poland: University of Opole.

Meyers, Jeffrey. 2001. Joseph Conrad: A Biography. 1991. New York: Cooper Square Press.Paulin, Tom. 2004. “Writing to the Moment.” The Guardian (25 September). Accessed 4 September 2012: www.

guardian.com.uk/books/2004/sep/25/society/politics.Said, Edward W. 1966. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

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Chatto & Windus.——. 1994b. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books.——. 1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta Books.——. 2001. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. New Delhi: Penguin Books.——. 2004a. Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan. London:

Bloomsbury.——. 2004b. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press.——. 2008. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. New York: Columbia University Press.

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