Interpreting Conrad

Conrad has a number of stories that all focus on a similar theme in somewhat different contexts, of which I have selected two: “An Outpost of Progress” and Heart of Darkness. Footnote ¹⁰ Perhaps the most obvious difference between them is in their popularity. Heart of Darkness is widely read among academics and students alike, and is so widely critiqued that to contribute to this literature is a daunting enterprise. “An Outpost of Progress,” conversely, has received very little attention in comparison, and the responses it has received have differed greatly from one another. V. S. Naipaul declared it the “finest thing Conrad wrote,” but the more common view is that it is a lesser work.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, Conrad himself expressed some ambivalence about it, declaring his unhappiness with it on one occasion and citing it as his favorite among his short stories on another.Footnote ¹²

Both works exhibit a deeply ambiguous attitude toward imperialism, a fact that has generated diametrically opposed interpretations of each. According to some critics “An Outpost of Progress” is a powerful critique of imperialism, while others see it as concrete evidence of imperialism's worst aspects. Ian Watt offers one example of the former view. In “An Outpost of Progress,” he writes,

As in most of Conrad's works, however, even the sharpest critiques of European hypocrisy have a dangerous double edge. On the one hand, they show the falseness and the folly of the Europeans' attempts to impose their ideals on other peoples in other places. At the same time, as many have noted, Conrad's critique consistently draws from a racially charged vocabulary that is intertwined with a number of racist assumptions, including the designation of Africa and of Africans as primitive, savage, uncivilized, and dangerous.

The most famous articulation of this critique is Chinua Achebe's denunciation of Conrad (particularly in Heart of Darkness) as a “thoroughgoing racist.”Footnote ¹⁴ To those who maintain that Conrad's real goal is to critique Europeans, Achebe replies that this is part of his point. Conrad's critique of Europe, he contends, rests on the construction of Africa as a foil, a negation, and a prop, devoid of humanity or even of its own individuality. Worse still, he continues, this attitude is not confined to Heart of Darkness or even to the works of Conrad. Rather, the racist assumptions are part of a prevailing attitude with very tangible political and social consequences in the real world. In Achebe's view, to “celebrate” these attitudes in fiction, even under the guise of critiquing them, is to further entrench them in reality.

Applying a similar observation to “An Outpost of Progress,” A. J. M. Johnson has rightly noted that this story's clear indictment of European imperialism is also grounded in a racially charged set of dynamics. As he puts it, however foolish, thoughtless, misguided, and ignorant the Europeans may be in this tale, they are still portrayed as superior to the Africans.Footnote ¹⁵ For Johnson, as for Achebe, Conrad's critique of European imperialism still rests on the problematic African foil that serves as its backdrop.

Conrad's use of racist categories and language, well documented by Achebe and others, can make him difficult to defend and often leaves those who try to do so with an air of desperation about their attempts. They claim, for example, that Conrad's use of racist images are a parody rather than a true expression of his views, and that he only uses this type of imagery and vocabulary in order to critique it.Footnote ¹⁶ Others refer to Conrad's political views, citing things like his opposition to the Boer War as evidence that he was a strong critic of imperialism and of the racism it fostered, regardless of what one might find in the content of his stories.

Edward Said's well known analysis of Conrad strikes a middle ground, arguing that Conrad does expose the contingency of imperialism, but that he nevertheless fails either to get beyond this contingency or to point to an alternative.Footnote ¹⁷ Without denying that he opposed the policies of imperialism because of the racism and violence they engendered, Said's view suggests that Conrad remained stuck within a vocabulary that re-inscribes the very things he sought to critique.

Yet another way to look at it is to say that Conrad was less concerned to write about specific individuals than he was to reflect on a particular situation: that is, the experience of the European expatriate. Indeed, some have suggested that this theme so dominates Conrad's work that he “very nearly wrote the same book over and over again.” As Lloyd Fernando puts it, Conrad's stories repeatedly examine the range of responses individuals might have, whether rightly or wrongly, justifiably or otherwise, to a particular kind of experience: the encounter with another culture.Footnote ¹⁸ This experience, stated more philosophically, is in essence the experience of confronting the limitations of one's own values. The significance of the “expatriate” experience in Conrad's rendering of it is the challenge of determining whether the beliefs that apply in one's own political, social, and historical context also hold true beyond that context. In other words, it is the question of whether one's values are universally valid, or only locally and contingently so.

Conrad's fiction struggles to choose between a problematic universalism on one side, and relativism on the other. Relativism, as Berlin famously put it, is the view that “I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said.”Footnote ¹⁹ As a political statement, such a view is dangerous indeed, in that it undermines the grounds on which to condemn practices of another culture that one finds objectionable or morally abhorrent.Footnote ²⁰

The basic problem of universalism, as Conrad was well aware, is that it can actually restrict our ability to appreciate particular details and hence to properly understand—and to act in—the world. At the same time, he is unwilling to adopt an extreme form of relativism that would accept all cultures as equally valuable. In his view, all people—Western and non-Western alike—are the product of their histories, both individually and collectively. The real difficulty is caused by the fact that he clearly prefers one set of historical experiences and values over the other: he prefers European culture to that of non-Western peoples, and British culture to that of the rest of Europe.Footnote ²¹ This, as recent debate about multiculturalism has pointed out, is the downside of local attachments: they are local precisely because they are not universal, and as such they are exclusionary.

For this reason, both sides of the debate about Conrad described above are in some sense correct. Those who defend him as a critic of imperialism respond to the currents in his writing rejecting the universalism that would justify imposing one's values forcibly onto others. Those who critique him as racist respond to the exclusionary current, in which his embrace of particularity also entails strong and clearly hierarchical distinctions among differing sets of values.

Although Conrad's fiction exemplifies this problem in a specific way, the difficulty isn't Conrad's alone. Rather, as I will argue, in his writings he grapples with—but does not fully resolve—the fundamental philosophical tension between universal and particular in liberal thought. This tension, which troubled both critics and defenders of enlightenment thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to a large extent remains unresolved, and continues to cast a shadow over political thinking today.

The Limits of Universalism

To explore Conrad's fiction in light of its philosophical influences is a difficult task. While there are many elements in his stories that seem to express this or that philosophical perspective, few of these references are explicit enough to trace confidently back to their sources. Moreover, Conrad explicitly rejects the attempt to find a philosophy in literature. “Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist,” he writes. “To try to voluntarily discover the fettering dogmas of some romantic, realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of its own inspiration is a trick worthy of human perverseness.”Footnote ²²

Still, much in Conrad's writing seems deeply philosophical. Ian Watt summarizes the problem nicely. “But if Conrad disclaims being a thinker,” he writes, “he strikes us as very thoughtful; and if we cannot call him a philosopher, the intimations of his fictional world steadily invite ethical and even metaphysical response.”Footnote ²³

In pursuit of these intimations, some commentators have sought to find the direct influence of particular philosophers on Conrad's writing, while others have highlighted the way he expresses currents of thought influential in his day. One of the most interesting of this latter type of interpretation comes from Avrom Fleishman. Fleishman situates Conrad “squarely within the organicist tradition” informed by Romantic, Victorian, and German idealist influences.Footnote ²⁴ Fleishman's interpretation is particularly strong in its recognition of the importance of Burke and Rousseau both to this tradition and to Conrad as well; however, there are ways in which his analysis does not go far enough.

First, there is the matter of evidence. According to Fleishman, Conrad “formed himself, consciously or unconsciously, in the ‘great tradition’ of nineteenth century British fiction,” which in turn followed in tandem with the philosophical currents he discusses. He concludes that there is “no need to establish that Conrad read” any of the philosophers to whom he compares him, as their influence was “so pervasive… as to affect anyone who grew up in their shadow.”Footnote ²⁵ While there is merit to this claim, it understates the extent to which some knowledge of these thinkers on Conrad's part is very likely. As others have suggested, Conrad's references to a variety of philosophical thinkers—including Plato, Rousseau, Carlyle, and others—in both his stories and his personal letters indicates more than a passing awareness of their works.

Second, and more importantly, although the links between Burke and Conrad are abundant, there are also some significant differences. Conrad was deeply divided over the degree to which local traditions and practices might be said to contain a universal element. On the one hand, he wanted to avoid the pessimistic conclusion that there is no metaphysical support for our most fundamental beliefs and values.Footnote ²⁶ On the other hand, he is often more skeptical even than Burke in the extent to which he thinks it is possible to avoid such a conclusion.

The subject matter of Conrad's writing invites even more speculation. This is especially true of works like Heart of Darkness in which Africa appears to have the status of an imaginary past, pre-social condition rather than that of a specific location. “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings…. We were wanderers on prehistoric earth,” reflects Marlow.Footnote ²⁷ It is no surprise that commentators would be tempted to read this and other passages like it as an argument about the “state of nature.” Those who do so find it pessimistically Hobbesian, hinting at seething undercurrents of “frenzy” and unrestrained passion beneath the trappings of culture and civilization human beings since have given to themselves.Footnote ²⁸

Hobbes of course is infamous for having described life outside civil society as necessarily “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”Footnote ²⁹ This, like any view of the state of nature, is essentially a device for making claims about supposedly essential or fundamental and hence universal human characteristics. For Hobbes those characteristics include, first and foremost, an overriding impulse toward one's own self-interest, and second, a basic equality among all individuals. According to Hobbes's well known view, human beings are relatively equal not only in their self-interested character but also in their ability to get what they want, whether through their physical strength or their intellectual capacities. This essential equality—a nominally liberal element of his thought—is for Hobbes both the cause of conflict and the reason that human beings must establish a powerful authority. Thus, he offers a universalist premise with a correspondingly universal conclusion.

If Conrad does indeed have a view of “human nature,” it is articulated only incompletely. In his view, if humans share anything in common, it is unspecified, “mysterious,” and “inscrutable,” without clear meaning and containing a combination of positive and negative attributes. Further, what distinguishes Conrad from Hobbes most fully is his refusal to draw any universal conclusions from his premises. On this point, Conrad is much more similar to Rousseau. For Rousseau, the progression from the natural to the civilized state is not guided by any causal or predictable chain of events. Where Hobbes, in contrast, identified the basis of the social contract in the laws of nature—that is, a series of universally consistent rules found out through reason—Rousseau posits no such laws. Instead, he continually indicates that the real reasons for our passage into civil society are haphazard, and in some ways quite unfathomable. “Man is born free,” Rousseau writes at the beginning of the Social Contract, “and everywhere he is in chains…. How did this change take place? I have no idea.”Footnote ³⁰

In fact, it isn't entirely true that Rousseau has no idea about this; what he is really saying is that he believes there is a significant element of chance, unpredictability, and particularity to human development. Each of our civilization's creations—ideas of justice, property, or morality, for example—is both artificial and accidental. He describes property, for example, as the product of one person's decision to appropriate land by uttering those infamous and fateful words, “this is mine.”Footnote ³¹ But even this, he continues, required a variety of previously formed ideas;Footnote ³²; moreover, those ideas required language;Footnote ³³ and language developed arbitrarily and unevenly, in response to natural circumstances.Footnote ³⁴

Thus, for Rousseau as for Conrad, there is actually very little connection between our “nature” and the civilizational artifacts layered upon it. Where they diverge most sharply, however, is in their judgments about those artifices. In short, Rousseau believes that civilization—particularly European civilization—corrupts. Reason, in his view, intensifies rather than relieves conflict; the sciences destroy virtue; the arts have replaced integrity with the desire for praise; and decadent luxury enfeebles humanity while so-called norms of “justice” oppress it.

Rousseau is equally critical about what he perceives as the gradual loss of heterogeneity, again mostly a European ailment. He writes, “a vile and deceitful uniformity reigns in our mores, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold.”Footnote ³⁵ Travel to other places—what today we might call globalization—only worsens the problem. Through “commerce, voyages and conquests,” argues Rousseau, European countries have continuous and increasingly close contact with one another and consequently become more and more alike.Footnote ³⁶ Those who travel more distantly, continues Rousseau, do no better; just as Hobbes attributed society's qualities to his allegedly “natural” man, so too do travel writers with more exotic destinations see only themselves in other peoples. Woefully inattentive to differences, this “philosophizing rabble” erroneously concludes “that men are everywhere the same; that, since everywhere they have the same passions and the same vices, it is rather pointless to seek to characterize different peoples.”Footnote ³⁷

Although Conrad and Rousseau share the basic view that human development is haphazard and heterogeneous, Rousseau is far more adamant in his call for drastic reform, particularly in the Social Contract. Conrad, conversely, prefers preservation to renovation. This preference is one he shares strongly with Burke, who likewise has a deep appreciation for the particular traditions, practices, and inherited values in a society. For Burke, the most important thing about “prejudices”—our specific inherited beliefs and traditions—is that they foster our attachment to local identities. Burke famously puts it this way: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”Footnote ³⁸

Despite the clear emphasis on local attachments in this quote, it is striking that Burke justifies these attachments with reference to a more universal standard: that is, the love of mankind.Footnote ³⁹ The direction suggested in this quote is important: for Burke, one must always proceed from the particular to the general, and never the other way around. This is the basis of Burke's critique of abstract philosophy in the Reflections. In his view, the French revolutionaries erred in ignoring the norms generated by their specific history and its particular practices. Instead, he argues, they attempted to apply abstract ideas (like the “rights of man”) onto practice in a way that threatened to destroy the existing fabric of society. Abstractions of this sort may be “metaphysically true,” but because they also may be “morally and politically false,” they are not an appropriate basis for practice.Footnote ⁴⁰

For Burke, if there is anything universal to be discovered, it can never be found through metaphysical speculation. Instead, elements of it can be found only through the processes of history that would generate and reveal those elements. This at least partly teleological element is present in the Reflections, but even more clearly so in his speeches on British policy in India.Footnote ⁴¹ In these speeches, Burke criticizes the activities of the East India Company in general, but he also focuses specifically on the abuses he believed had been perpetrated by Warren Hastings, former governor of Bengal.

Strikingly, much of Burke's attack on Hastings appears to draw on principles that stand above and beyond contingent practices—in other words, precisely the kind of universals we might expect him to reject. Hastings, in Burke's opinion, has not only breached British law; he has committed crimes against “eternal laws of justice.”Footnote ⁴² He condemns Hastings and the others in the East India Company for abandoning real moral principles in favor of a “Geographical morality,” which wrongly would suggest that “when you have crossed the equinoctial line all the virtues die.”Footnote ⁴³

In Burke's view, the benefits of longstanding traditions and practices are not merely that they provide stability. More importantly, he believes they act as the source of the moral principles that transcend geographical and other local boundaries. These are precisely the grounds on which he defends Britain's “constitution” early in the Reflections: they have generated important ideas and institutions, including “an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and an house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties.” In Burke's view, these are demonstrably better than other alternatives, and they provide a kind of “wisdom without reflection” that yields a standard—indeed, the only standard—by which to measure conduct.Footnote ⁴⁴

Burke believes that what is best in Britain's “inheritances” will be consistent with what is best in other traditions as well. In the speeches on the Hastings trial, Burke examines the historical foundations of Indian government, and concludes that it rests on precedents and principles that in his view are very much like those of the British Constitution. Citing among other things the Koran, the “Fetfa” (fetwa; “sentence of the law”), the “Kanon” (Kanun; “regulations to supplement… Sharia”), and the “Rage ul Mulk” (Ravaj al Mulk; “custom of the state”), he argues that “they have laws from more sources than we have, exactly in the same order, grounded upon the same authority, fundamentally fixed to be administered to the people upon these principles.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Though Burke may overstate the parallels between the two systems of law, this overstatement reveals the partly universalistic element in his thinking.

This aspect of Burke's thought creates a challenge for those who would draw comparisons between Conrad and Burke. While Conrad sometimes hints at similarly teleological elements, he does not go nearly as far as Burke in identifying a clear set of standards that might be applied across cultures. To clarify this difference, it is useful to compare Conrad to a second and later strand of conservatism, best expressed by Michael Oakeshott. Like Burke, Oakeshott emphasizes the importance of traditions and practices; and again like Burke, he is opposed to the pursuit of philosophical abstractions in political life.

Oakeshott, though, does not object to these things because he fears that they would violate universally valid norms, or that they would interrupt our progress toward such norms. Instead, his opposition is based primarily on his view that those abstractions threaten stability.

Oakeshott famously uses the analogy of a ship to illustrate his view of the activity of politics. “In political activity,” Oakeshott writes, “men sail a boundless and bottomless sea: there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Significantly, in denying the possibility of either a concrete starting point or an arrival, this view denies precisely the kind of teleology strongly intimated by Burke. Oakeshott's skepticism runs even deeper than that of Burke, in that he rejects the idea that our histories and practices can reveal any substantive norms of right or wrong, good or bad.

Many of the tensions in Conrad's fiction stem from the fact that he is essentially caught between these two alternatives. On the one hand, he is suspicious of universalism and of the many negative consequences that follow from it. On the other hand, however, he is also concerned about the loss of ideals as a problem for individuals and society alike.Footnote ⁴⁷ Those who identify Conrad as conservative are partly correct, but they fail to note the way he occupies a position between the two kinds of conservatism described above.

In “An Outpost of Progress” and Heart of Darkness Conrad takes up the problem of universalism not through the nautical imagery one might expect, but rather through the metaphor of sight. In so doing, he emphasizes that universals can create a kind of blindness. To view the world through universalistic lenses actually limits understanding; their generality limits the scope of what can be “seen.” This metaphor runs throughout his writing, and extends even to his view of the task of the literary artist. He describes this task as follows: “by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That … and no more, and it is everything.”Footnote ⁴⁸

In the stories addressed here, Conrad is concerned with two types of blindness in particular. One is that which results from the failure to recognize the contingent character of one's own beliefs. As the following sections will show, Conrad plainly criticizes this in some ways, but he is not always perfectly consistent in this critique. Indeed, he even indicates that there are certain circumstances in which this type of blindness is not only acceptable, but is even potentially beneficial.

The second type of blindness is a more extreme version of the first. Here, Conrad rejects not merely the failure to perceive limitations, but the desire to treat as universal what is in fact particular. This is something about which Conrad is far more consistently critical, though again we will see that there are cases in which he believes this error is actually preferable to its alternatives.

Ultimately, Conrad is best understood in light of these philosophical currents, as they illuminate the way in which he sought to negotiate between the claims of particular, local norms and more universally applicable moral standards. In “An Outpost of Progress,” Conrad illustrates the defects of an imperialistic outlook that is unable to see its own limitations. In Heart of Darkness, he shows the limits of an even more damaging imperialistic tendency to promote an excessively universalizing idealism.

“An Outpost of Progress”: Looking without Seeing

Like many of Conrad's tales, the basic plot of “An Outpost of Progress” is quite simple. It is the story of two Belgians who are left to run a remote and ineffectual ivory trading station, with a staff consisting of an African bookkeeper named Makola and a number of unnamed slaves. As the two Belgians await the return of the steamship that brought them there, a crisis occurs in which Makola sells their slaves in return for a large batch of ivory. After this incident, the nearby tribe which had previously given them assistance ceases to do so, and the men deteriorate physically and mentally until one day, in an absurd accident, one kills the other. The very next day, the steamboat arrives, and the Director of the “Great Company” for which they work finds the dead bodies of the two men. One has been shot, and the other has hung himself from the cross marking the grave of the station chief who had preceded him.

The opening pages of the story, which Conrad intended to convey an “artistic simplicity,” offer a most economical—perhaps even stingy—description of two of the key characters, Kayerts and Carlier. “There were two white men in charge of the trading station. Kayerts, the chief, was short and fat; Carlier, the assistant, was tall, with a large head and a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Conrad uses the same style to describe the two men's surroundings. The reader is told in very simple language that their residence is a three-room hut; that it is made of reeds and has a plank floor; that it is not far from the off-kilter cross marking the grave of the previous station chief.

These descriptions are most remarkable for how little they offer: they are terse and shallow, providing a few superficial details without suggesting any underlying meaning, and giving minimal information without a trace of insight. A short way into the story, the reasons for this become clearer. By limiting his descriptions in this way, Conrad effectively places the reader in the same position as Kayerts and Carlier, who are defined almost entirely by their shocking lack of insight. Shortly after they arrive, the latter glances around and, wondering if there is money to be made at their new post, mutters “We shall see.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In reality, though, the opposite is true: everything else Conrad will tell us about these characters indicates their blindness and their shortsightedness.

At this point in the story, the reader should already suspect that Kayerts and Carlier are decidedly lacking in character. This suspicion is confirmed by the director of the “Great Trading Company” for whom they work. Conrad says almost nothing of this figure apart from his assessment of the two he leaves behind. “Look at those two imbeciles,” the director says. “They must be mad at home to send me such specimens…. I always thought the station on this river useless, and they just fit the station!”Footnote ⁵¹

Not only do the director's remarks indicate Kayerts' and Carlier's defects, but they also suggest that the station itself is an ill-conceived project. The director's lament is that of a person told by superiors, who know little about what they authorize, to do something he knows is foolish. In this story, the inability to see consequences and meanings is the hallmark of the whole imperial enterprise, and of all those characters involved with it as well. Conrad writes of the two main characters in this story that they “lived like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in contact with them (and of that only imperfectly), but unable to see the general aspect of things.”Footnote ⁵² Like the global travelers described by Rousseau, they reach “the end of the world” but “understand only what it was for them to notice without leaving their street.”Footnote ⁵³

Their myopic perspective renders their surroundings meaningless to them. When they look into the forest, which the reader knows to be populated by others in this story, Kayerts and Carlier see only emptiness. They read some “wrecks of novels” left behind by their predecessor, and respond to these fictions more strongly than they do to reality. Gossiping about the imaginary characters as if they were actual people, Kayerts and Carlier “discounted their virtues, suspected their motives, decried their successes.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In perhaps the greatest confusion between fact and fiction, the two come across an old newspaper, which “spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work.” Kayerts and Carlier treat this fiction too as a reality, and they speculate vaguely and dreamily about the honor that their work at the outpost will supposedly bring them one day.Footnote ⁵⁵

All of these observations are made in a single paragraph; but if the point were not yet clear, Conrad definitively drives it home in the last few sentences. Carlier, in a fit of uncharacteristic industriousness, repairs the cross at the grave of the previous station chief, dangling from it to be sure it is secure. Not only is he blind to the future significance of that cross; his actions illustrate how little he and his counterpart think about the past as well. Kayerts is under the impression that the previous station chief had died of fever; Carlier thinks it was from exposure to the sun. They are aware of, but never question, this discrepancy. When Carlier hangs obliviously from this ominous symbol, it dramatizes their failure to recognize any but the most superficial things about their actions.

Given that Conrad attributes so much import to the power of sight, by which he really means insight, his portrayal of their blindness is intended as a damning critique. Yet at the same time, there is another sense in which, for Conrad, blindness of a particular type is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, he even suggests that a form of blindness is the prerequisite of any culture. Conrad writes,

Like Burke, Conrad believes that a society's beliefs and values are largely the product of belief rather than of truth. The connection to Burke's idea of “prejudices” as societal anchors is unmistakable. Burke argues in the Reflections that a society's prejudices may be illusory, but they are no less necessary as a result. Indeed for Burke as for Conrad, such “pleasing illusions” require a degree of “blindness” as the more they are scrutinized, the more they will be revealed as contingent and thus undermined.Footnote ⁵⁷

Similarly, Conrad indicates in “An Outpost of Progress” that the real power of a culture's values stems from interpretation rather than truth. For Conrad, an individual's beliefs are not a static artifact; rather, they are the product of one's interpretation of his or her environment, and whether it is seen as protective and stable or not. The disappearance of that perception—that is, when one no longer believes oneself safe—results in the apparent confrontation with “pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man,” which “brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart.”Footnote ⁵⁸

This confrontation, however, is always only imagined. As the quote above and the trajectory of the story both illustrate, the decline experienced by Kayerts and Carlier comes not from their actual contact with Africa, but from their lack of contact with it or indeed, with anything else. On the one hand, they are removed from the European context which gave them their identity (such as it is); on the other hand, they live in Africa “like blind men,” who see nothing other than what is already in their heads. Ultimately, it is this two-fold isolation that leads to their decline.

Of course, there is also a significant difference between Burke and Conrad on this point. For Burke, the real danger comes from an excess of reason.Footnote ⁶⁰ This, however, is hardly the problem with Kayerts and Carlier. Instead, it is that their inheritances are insufficient to carry them through; they lack character, they lack depth, and most of all they are in a situation which cannot compensate for these defects. It is their isolation—from their own society, from their current environment, and from each other—that ultimately renders their values ineffectual and worthless.

For Conrad, this is not only a critique of the way imperialism destroys the contexts that give societal values their significance. It also conveys strong skepticism about the validity of a society's beliefs, indicating that the authority of any given set of principles and institutions derives only from their context—from the “crowd” that believes blindly in them. For Conrad, there may indeed be safety in the habitual and the customary, but unlike Burke he does not explicitly identify any transcendent goodness in these things.

While he eschews any vision of transcendent goodness, however, Conrad does judge some things as universally wrong, regardless of cultural context. He does this not by dogmatic assertion but by using specific examples that invite the reader to make the same judgment. In this story, he does this by presenting Kayerts and Carlier as more than just absurd; they do things that the reader is meant to understand as explicitly wrong. The ten African “station men” left under Kayerts' and Carlier's care, for example, are ostensibly working for the Company on a temporary contract. In reality, they are little more than slaves, kept against their will at the station for more than two years, with no end to their servitude in sight. They are unhappy, ill, and poorly nourished, and their exploitation is limited only by the incompetence and laziness of the two Belgians. Though inexplicably they do not run away, Conrad describes their condition as little better than death.

In a pivotal part of the story, the bookkeeper Makola sells these men to a violent and warlike tribe passing by the station in exchange for a large load of ivory—the only ivory the station is able to procure. When Kayerts and Carlier discover this, they initially react with indignant horror, but their indignation is superficial and they quickly overcome their objections. “It's deplorable,” Carlier rationalizes, “but, the men being Company's men, the ivory is Company's ivory. We must look after it.”Footnote ⁶¹ Conrad makes it clear that the reaction of the two men is as deplorable as the situation itself. This is true not for contingent reasons, but due to the more fundamental inhumanity of their conduct, which Conrad suggests is wrong in any context.Footnote ⁶²

The conclusion of this story, in contrast to the conclusion of Heart of Darkness, is an odd combination of tragic and comic. Kayerts and Carlier await the belated return of the steamship in utter isolation. Having alienated the one nearby tribe that had been friendly to them, and that had been supporting them with offers of food and other items, they run perilously low on supplies and exist solely on a diet of boiled rice and coffee. One day, they begin to argue over the small remaining supply of sugar, which Kayerts has locked away in case of “emergency.” As Carlier becomes increasingly threatening, Kayerts suddenly becomes aware that Carlier, with whom he has lived for eight months, seems “unknown” and “dangerous.”Footnote ⁶³ The decline in the relationship between the two men mirrors exactly the dynamic described in the quote analyzed above: it is not the actual threat posed by Carlier, but Kayerts's perception of such a threat, that sets in motion the final actions of the story.

As their argument escalates, Carlier threatens to shoot Kayerts; Kayerts grabs his gun, and they begin their final chase around and around the veranda of the house. As Kayerts runs laboriously around in circles, Conrad writes that he is “unable yet to understand what was happening to him. He saw in succession Makola's house, the store, the river, the ravine, and the low bushes; and he saw all those things again as he ran for the second time round the house. Then again they flashed past him.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Kayerts' disorientation is illustrated here in the shift of perspective that Conrad takes: in his description, it is as if the scenery itself is rotating around, rather than Kayerts who is in motion. Significantly, Conrad gives no description of Carlier; the only information he offers is that which comes through Kayerts's perceptions. As it turns out, his perceptions are entirely wrong. The whole chase is driven by Kayerts's incorrect assumption that Carlier has a gun; and when the two finally collide, Kayerts assumes that he has been shot, even though it is his own gun that has gone off, killing Carlier in the process.

As Kayerts begins to realize what has occurred, the long-awaited and long-overdue steamship arrives.Footnote ⁶⁵ By the time the director gets ashore, Kayerts has hung himself. The final image of the story is the suspended body of Kayerts, “standing rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully posed on the shoulder. And irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue at his Managing Director.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Conrad could have made this story even darker than it already is, but as the final image indicates, with the dead Kayerts in a gesture of petty defiance, Conrad clearly intends for it to express a darkness of a semi-comic kind. Conrad's cynically humorous touch at the end underscores the theme of blindness by ensuring the overall meaninglessness not only of what has occurred between the two men, but also of the whole enterprise. One can try to imagine what might come next if the story were to continue, but the strongest indication is that nothing would change. The director might shake his head in amazed dismay before burying the two bodies alongside the body of the first station chief. Ultimately, though, there would be no conclusion and no redemption. The death of Kayerts and Carlier would not serve as a reproach to the “Great Trading Company,” because unlike the reader, the company cannot “see” the meaning of the story.

In sum, Conrad uses this story to convey two main things. First, he acknowledges that a type of “blindness” is a necessary part of any culture's inheritance: one must believe that one's values are more than arbitrary. However, what may be an advantage in one context becomes a defect in another: specifically, in the context of imperialism, in which a variety of inexperienced and ill-prepared individuals are unleashed into a context they do not understand, to undertake projects whose consequences elude control.

More specifically, Conrad criticizes an imperialism whose main purpose is economic exploitation, and rejects any ideas of “progress” attached to it as overwhelmingly self-evident hypocrisy. For Conrad, the “outpost of progress” is simply a voracious and destructive commercial enterprise, worthy of contempt and condemnation.

One might wonder whether Conrad thinks anything could have redeemed this ill fated outpost, and how the story might be different if Kayerts and Carlier had not been such obviously ignoble figures. The answer is elusive; in this story, Conrad gives us no real way to answer that question. A more extensive if still ambiguous treatment of this theme is found in Heart of Darkness, where we will see Conrad contend with a very different type of character: that of an extraordinary individual who becomes corrupt.

Heart of Darkness: The Excesses of Idealism

“An Outpost of Progress” and Heart of Darkness share some similar themes, and often are compared to one another.Footnote ⁶⁷ There are, however, some significant differences between the two works.Footnote ⁶⁸ The latter is considerably longer and more complex, more subtle, and more ambiguous as well. Whereas “Outpost of Progress” offers a fairly straightforward critique of imperialism as an economically exploitative enterprise, Heart of Darkness goes further by exploring the ideals often used to justify, and in some cases to obscure, the exploitation.

This theme is established from the very opening lines of Heart of Darkness. It is set on the deck of a ship where four men sit listening to the central character, Marlow, tell the story of a trip he made to Africa in his youth. This tale comprises the main portion of the novella, but the initial scene is set by an unnamed narrator who reflects on the history of the Thames, in which their ship is anchored. That river, he notes, has long been a passage of enlightenment, a conduit for “adventurers” and “settlers,” “generals,” and “interlopers.”

The first time Marlow speaks in this story, it is to undercut this glowing nostalgia. Rather than praising the imperial tradition, as the narrator appears to do, Marlow instead emphasizes the contingent character of Britain's history and traditions. “And this also,” he says, meaning London and Great Britain more generally, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”Footnote ⁷⁰

By this, Marlow doesn't merely mean that Britain's “greatness” has been a historical achievement. He also emphasizes the extent to which the distinction between “enlightenment” and “darkness” is an artifice, a perception rather than a reality. He draws a comparison between the contemporary British and the ancient Romans to illustrate the point. In the past, he muses, the Romans traveled the unknown parts of the world in search of fame, glory, prestige, or pure wealth. As they sailed up the Thames, he speculates, they must have felt themselves surrounded by “the savagery, the utter savagery” of a primitive and unfathomable world.Footnote ⁷¹

The parallel is clear: just as the Romans perceived Britain as a primitive and savage place, so too do the British and other Europeans perceive Africa. Though Marlow's words foreshadow this dynamic, he is also implicated in it: he too will describe Africa in these same unflattering terms as he tells his tale. Conrad, though, does not endorse these negative views as true. Rather, he illustrates what he sees as a pronounced tendency for people everywhere to perceive whatever is outside their own culture as mysterious, unfamiliar, and consequently, as dangerous. For the Europeans, as both Heart of Darkness and “Outpost of Progress” indicate, the “mystery” and the “savagery” are always only perceptions, related more to the fragility of the beholder's beliefs than to the reality of the external world.

For Conrad, the boundary line between idealism and hypocrisy is elusive. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Marlow's infamous evaluation of the difference between British colonists and Roman conquerors. “What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency,” claims Marlow. Unlike the British currently, he continues, the Romans in the past “were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect…. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale.”Footnote ⁷²

Although Marlow appears to posit a firm distinction between “robbery with violence” and a loftier ideal, the distinction doesn't fully withstand scrutiny. Marlow continues his reflection as follows:

Commentators have differed widely on the meaning of this passage, but several things suggest an ironic interpretation of it is correct.Footnote ⁷⁴ The first is Conrad's decision to use “efficiency” as the basis on which to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate conquering. An idea of truth or justice might hint at something that is to be valued for its own sake, but “efficiency” is more explicitly instrumental, a characteristic of means rather than of ends. Marlow's words endorse it enthusiastically, but to share this enthusiasm the reader would have to believe in the value of “efficiency” just as strongly as Marlow professes to.

This becomes less and less likely as Conrad reveals the actual consequences of this alleged virtue. A French warship sits off the coast, “incomprehensible, firing into a continent.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The outer ivory station is a “scene of inhabited devastation”; an overturned railway car is “lying on its back” and resembles “the carcass of some animal” amidst some “decaying machinery” and other artifacts of western industriousness broken and rusting in the grass. The “work” of the station ostensibly is to build a railroad, but no work is being done other than the “objectless blasting” of a cliff that was not obstructing anything.Footnote ⁷⁶

Kurtz's “idealism” offers one possible alternative to the idea of efficiency, but as Marlow and the reader both quickly discover. this too is problematic. Kurtz, of course, is the eccentric and mysterious station chief who forms the centerpiece of this story. One of the most notable qualities about him is his ability to make his remote trading station produce amazing quantities of ivory. Despite his display of the dubious virtue of “efficiency,” the others in this story find it difficult to wholly endorse his efforts. “Ivory…lots of it—prime sort—lots—most annoying, from him,” grumbles the manager of the Central station.Footnote ⁷⁷

Although one might expect a more enthusiastic response, given Kurtz's extraordinary success in procuring ivory, this is not the case. Primarily, these men mistrust him because he presents a threat to their own quest for wealth. Whereas the other traders make acquisition their ideal, however, for Kurtz “efficiency” is only a secondary consideration in a larger vision, a grotesque parody of the idealism associated with the imperial impulse. As the others note in hushed tones of admiration, sarcasm, and resentment in equal parts, Kurtz sees himself as “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else.” The manager of the Central station in particular disparagingly repeats what is evidently Kurtz's self-described philosophy: “‘Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing’.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Faced with these alternatives, Marlow initially is more deeply horrified by the nihilistic fetishizing of material gain (“efficiency”) expressed by the other ivory traders. “I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men,” reflects Marlow. “But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”Footnote ⁷⁹ When given the choice between the “flabby devil” on the one hand and Kurtz's corruption on the other, Marlow fully embraces the latter.

This is only true, however, until he discovers the truth about Kurtz's activities. In one scene, Marlow discovers a pamphlet written by Kurtz as part of a report for “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs,” which unsettlingly combines eloquence, idealism, madness, racism, and violence. It begins by recommending that the Europeans exercise “a power for good practically unbounded” by presenting themselves to the Africans as “supernatural beings,” and ends in the infamous and terrifying postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!”Footnote ⁸⁰

As Marlow discovers, the reference to violence is more than a suggestion, and while the details of Kurtz's nefarious activities are clear to Marlow, they are only disclosed to the reader in fragmented images. When Marlow first approaches Kurtz's house, he notices it is surrounded by fenceposts capped with ornamental knobs; on closer inspection, he realizes that these are in fact human heads. Allusions to “midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” strongly suggest human sacrifices and possibly cannibalism. A more comprehensive picture of Kurtz's plans is not given, but neither is it necessary.Footnote ⁸¹

Marlow's discovery transforms what was previously a clear choice for him into a “choice of nightmares,” as he realizes the similarities between the two alternatives. Kurtz's version is more shockingly dramatic, perhaps, but the treatment of the Africans forced to work at the outer ivory station is no less cruel. “They were dying slowly,” Marlow recalls with horror, “nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation…. Brought from all recesses of the coast … lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.”Footnote ⁸²

Rather than justifying or otherwise transforming the violence, the “idea” of efficiency only masks it, and it does even this only thinly. Ultimately, Marlow will condemn Kurtz on the same grounds as those on which he condemns the other ivory traders, and it is not for a lack of “efficiency”; rather, it is for an excess of cruelty.

In each case, cruelty is a direct consequence of the restriction of vision that Conrad repeatedly critiques. For example, early in the story Marlow is horrified that the ivory traders refer to the Africans as “enemies” and “criminals.”Footnote ⁸³ He comes to realize, though, that Kurtz's messianic zeal has had the same consequence. When he inquires about the human heads around Kurtz's hut, he laughs out loud when he is told they had been rebels. “Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels! Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Conrad's assessment of idealism as dangerously blind is heavily foreshadowed in an early part of the story, well before Marlow actually meets Kurtz. Looking around the interior of one of the station houses, Marlow notices a picture that Kurtz had painted. It portrays a “woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch” against an almost completely darkened background. Quite literally, this combines the images of justice, with the blindfolded woman, and truth, with the illumination of the lantern. We might expect the light from such a figure to be benevolently illuminating, but instead Marlow describes its effect as “sinister.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The image illustrates Conrad's view that ideals—even those of “justice” or of “truth”—can have potentially perilous consequences when adhered to “blindly.” Just as the woman in the picture lacks context, surrounded only by a dark background, so too is Kurtz out of context, deep in the heart of the imagined “darkness” that Conrad so attentively describes throughout the story.

Initially, Kurtz appears to be distinguished from the vulgar materialists Marlow sees at the outer stations, particularly those identified as the “Eldorado Exploring Expedition.” As Marlow describes these characters, they are more closely analogous to the plundering Romans than to the British:

The difference between the two contemporary imperialists, however, much like the difference between the Romans and the British, turns out to be quite small. Greed may be offset by audacity, but it is still greed; cruelty may be combined with courage, but it is still cruelty.

While Conrad consistently undermines the notion of universally applicable ideals, there is one thing about which he presumes an element of universal agreement: the abhorrent nature of cruelty. One might say that like Hobbes, he rejects the idea of a summum bonum, and posits only a summum malum; but where Hobbes identifies this latter as death, Conrad includes the cruel and the inhumane.

If Conrad does share with Hobbes a vision of an “ultimate evil,” still he differs from him in his refusal to draw any solid conclusions from this premise. For Conrad, our “civilizing” artifices are irregular and fragile, and can inspire unease even as they demand our loyalty. This view is supported in the conclusion of Heart of Darkness, in which Marlow returns to Europe after Kurtz has died of fever, and he struggles to comprehend everything he has seen. Marlow himself is unmoored by his experience in the Congo, and when he tells of his return to the “sepulchral city” he describes himself as having been out of place and unwell. Most of all, he wishes he could forget; he recalls longing to commit Kurtz's entire memory to “an everlasting rest in the dust bin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilization.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Instead, Marlow ends up preserving this memory, or at least a highly sanitized and fictionalized version of it, with the famous lie that ends the story. Back in Brussels, he pays a visit to Kurtz's fiancée, to whom Kurtz was clearly never going to return even had he lived and to whom he had not been faithful. Grieving over his death, she reminisces about that “remarkable man,” who “drew men towards him by what was best in them,” a man of “greatness,” of “generous mind,” and of “noble heart.”Footnote ⁸⁸ To this, Marlow can only reply in veiled remarks with double meanings, numbly repeating that he was indeed “a remarkable man,” whose death “was in every way worthy of his life.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Finally, after confirming that Marlow was with Kurtz when he died, Kurtz's “Intended” asks what his last words were. Marlow reels in panic as he recalls Kurtz's final, ambiguous pronouncement—“The horror! The horror!”Footnote ⁹⁰ Rather than tell her this truth, and the many horrible truths that he learned about Kurtz during his time with him, Marlow resolves to tell a noble lie: “The last word he pronounced was—your name.”Footnote ⁹¹

On some level, Marlow recognizes that his lie is not just. True justice, he suggests, would have required the truth to be told about Kurtz's violence, madness, and infidelity. But that, he decides, would have been “too dark” in the sense that runs throughout the story: it would have too harshly extinguished the light of belief.Footnote ⁹² On one level, this choice suggests that the preserving belief must win in the end. Looked at from another perspective, though, this victory too is hollow: although Marlow tells the lie, he himself can never be expected to believe it.

In the end, it is not surprising that Conrad's fiction has generated as much controversy as it has. His skepticism is deep, but reluctant and often ambivalent. He is, however, decisive in critiquing at least one aspect of the tradition he otherwise defends: that is, the part suggesting that the experiences and beliefs of one particular historical circumstance may be treated as general rules to be applied with the confidence of moral conviction to all places and all times. This is a central and erroneous belief underpinning imperialism in the nineteenth century, and in large part it continues to be with us today.

Conrad's Dilemma Revisited

In the stories addressed here, Conrad oscillates between admiration for liberal ideals and skepticism about their veracity. While some aspects of his thinking are informed by the historical and intellectual milieu of the nineteenth century, it turns out that many of his observations still prove distinctly timely today.

This is especially true given the recently renewed vigor of debate about imperialism, particularly as it concerns the role of the United States. Much of this debate centers on the empirical question of what “imperialism” really is, and whether or not the term can accurately be applied to the United States.Footnote ⁹³ For those interested specifically in this question, Conrad's fiction will be somewhat less useful: he offers neither clear definitions nor sustained analysis of the concept of imperialism. However, for those interested in the broader philosophical and normative questions surrounding imperialism, Conrad has quite a bit more to offer.

The first and most basic of his critiques of imperialism is very simply that it is a thinly disguised avenue for unleashing greed. For Conrad, in “An Outpost of Progress” and Heart of Darkness, this is of course dramatized most starkly through his depictions of the ivory trade in Africa. This is itself is not surprising; others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made similar critiques as well.Footnote ⁹⁴ More surprising is how little things have changed since then. Today, many critics denounce so-called American imperialism as similarly exploitative, some even drawing explicit parallels between the charter companies of earlier empires and today's multinational corporations.Footnote ⁹⁵

Even more compelling, however, is a second question to which this first point is linked: that is, whether “imperialism” more broadly construed is a beneficial or a detrimental thing. Conrad clearly rejected the economic motives and consequences of imperialism, but he was deeply ambivalent about its more idealistic justifications. To some extent, he recognized the attractions of the impulse to export one's ideals and one's “civilization” as universally consistent goods. However, he remained profoundly skeptical about the feasibility—and consequently, the desirability—of doing so.

Today, as in the nineteenth century, there is undoubtedly an “idealistic” element to American imperialism. Its current idiom is not that of a “civilizing mission” but rather that of universalism, specifically concerning the values of liberty and democracy.Footnote ⁹⁶ This issue, which has historically been a problem for both liberal and conservative thought, continues to cause difficulty today.

In the years immediately after 2001, a number of conservatives and liberals alike united in idealistic support for the war in Iraq, and more broadly in favor of the idea that the United States is acting and should act as an “empire” in some fashion. For many of them, such a position was justified in terms of liberal democratic values and humanitarian concerns. This argument has been associated especially with neoconservatives.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, it also gained support from “liberal hawks” and “liberal interventionists” as well. Michael Ignatieff, for example, had early on characterized the United States as an “empire lite.” Trying to distinguish it from the imperialism of the nineteenth century, he argued that this empire rests not on “colonies, conquest and the white man's burden,” but rather on “free markets, human rights and democracy” by people “who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet in some ways statements like this actually confirmed what they sought to deny, emphasizing the elements of liberal universalism common to both versions of imperialism.

More recently, however, confidence in this type of universalism has waned noticeably. Although some have remained as idealistic as ever, others have reconsidered their earlier views.Footnote ⁹⁹ Their ambivalence is not unlike Conrad's own: while they find idealism very compelling in some ways, they are also troubled by deeply skeptical doubts, which are increasing in light of recent events. Ignatieff, for example, has retreated from his early position, most recently in an article in which he laments his former views as overly academic and as wrongly emphasizing general ideas over specific facts. He writes that “fixed ideas of a dogmatic kind are usually the enemy of good judgment,” adopting a newly strengthened skepticism that Conrad would have appreciated.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The question has generated similar reconsiderations among conservatives as well, and in many ways it has produced rifts that are even more striking. One of the best known neoconservatives, Francis Fukuyama, has recently announced his break from the neoconservatives on the grounds that they have become overly idealistic.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In his view, they have overestimated the extent to which the U.S. might use its power for moral ends, and thus have gone against one of their own key principles: suspicion towards “ambitious social engineering,” which “often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Fukuyama's ultimate recommendation of what he calls “realistic Wilsonianism” is a clear attempt to literally reconcile the two opposing extremes of pragmatism and idealism. Further, he is not alone in attempting to do this; other versions of similar attempts include Joseph Nye's “liberal realism,” and even Condoleeza Rice's recent use of the term “American realism.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In short, these efforts to coin new terminology are more than merely linguistic developments; rather, they indicate that conservatives and liberals alike are slowly rediscovering the same problems and paradoxes that captured Conrad's attention over a century ago. Again like Conrad, though they strive to resolve these dilemmas, they are having a great deal of difficulty doing so.

If Conrad has a conclusion about imperialism, it is that imperialism brings with it a tendency toward excessive idealism, and that the dangers of this extreme are far worse than the alternative. Even this conclusion, however, carries with it an almost tragic recognition of its own limitations. In Conrad's vision, notions of absolute goods are compelling and important but fictitious nevertheless, and in practice our choices are always choices among evils.

While foreign policy “realists” have long taken a prudential approach to the problem, rejecting moral objectives in favor of strategic concerns, others have been very reluctant to adopt what they see as an overly skeptical view. They have been unwilling to abandon idealism altogether for reasons not unlike those of Conrad: that is, that such a rejection seems far too cynical, and seems to undermine the possibility of defending the values in which one believes.

This has gradually begun to change, and liberals and conservatives alike have begun to pay renewed attention to skeptical conclusions like those ultimately drawn by Conrad. In today's debate, as in Conrad's writings, the resolution is imperfect and in some ways deeply unsatisfying. The long history of the problem—and its recent revival—suggest that the tensions with which Conrad struggled are unlikely to achieve a more perfect resolution any time soon. If there is a lesson to be drawn from Conrad's fiction, it is that such perfection is attractive and compelling, but ultimately illusory.