Culture and Imperialism

Said examines the solitary protagonists of some of Joseph Conrad’s works, contrasting them with English literature’s original novel protagonist, Robinson Crusoe. As the sole colonizer of his lonely island, Crusoe could participate in a utopian vision of imperial domination. By the time of Conrad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this redemptive narrative has been disrupted: “These modern versions of the imperialist who attempts self-redemption are doomed ironically to suffer interruption and distraction, as what they had tried to exclude from their island worlds penetrates anyway” (163). The imperial project has become self-conscious, its writers all too aware of the limits of knowing the “Other.” In Heart of Darkness, Conrad is fixated on the unknowable jungle, the inarticulate “savages,” and the mystery of Kurtz’s intentions; nothing is transparent, as it was in earlier fiction.

Still, situating Marlow as the narrator, telling his strange tale in England, casts Africa as an inferior blankness to Europe’s enlightened superiority. Marlow—and, by extension, Conrad—consciously and carefully structures the story, “for without his deliberately fashioned narrative there is no history worth telling, no fiction worth entertaining, no authority worth consulting” (165). This leads Said to consider how the native Africans are seen: Marlow’s primacy as speaker “effectively silences the Other” (166); his perspective calls to mind “actual explorers and imperialists like Rhodes, Murchison, and Stanley” (167), who saw only “natural depravity and loose character” in the native figure (168). Thus, the imperialist is justified in his control, the colonizer necessary to civilize the savage. Analyzing the rhetoric of some of these imperialists, Said concludes that their “descriptions commodified the natives and their labor and glossed over the actual historical conditions, spiriting away the facts of drudgery and resistance” (167). It is only through interaction with the European colonizer that the native can be improved.

Said distinguishes the French imperial project from the English by suggesting that France’s empire “was energized by ‘prestige’” (169), the notion of building a global society dominated by French “‘genius’” (169). This is in contrast to the more practical British view of propping up the appropriate colonial administration necessary to generate profit and peace. As such, “French empire was uniquely connected to the French national identity” (171), and this imperial desire—to reproduce “Frenchness” elsewhere—manifested most particularly in Algeria. Albert Camus, as an Algerian-born French writer, provides Said with a salient example of how French imperialism worked.

Camus’s works most famously investigate the vagaries of the human condition, the dissatisfactions of life, and the certainty of death. Said wants instead to situate Camus’s work in the context of the struggle for Algerian independence, the politics of which surrounded Camus throughout his life. The fact that the setting for many of his stories and novels is Algeria cannot be ignored, according to Said. He argues that Camus’s most famous works “draw on and in fact revive the history of French domination in Algeria, with a circumspect precision and a remarkable lack of remorse or compassion” (181). Because Camus privileges the French experience and the French national identity, he “neither disputes nor dissents from the campaign for sovereignty waged against Algerian Muslims for over a hundred years” (181). He is complicit in French domination and cruelty. Camus uses the backdrop of Algeria as “an exotic locale” in which French concerns, spiritual problems, and philosophical ideas can play out; there is no concern for the natives or their plight (181). Far from being solely about “a liberated existential humanity” (185), L’Etranger (The Stranger) papers over the actual historical struggles of colonialism, including the Algerian desire to overthrow “a systematically unjust political system” (185).

In this brief section, Said illustrates how imperialism continued into the 20th century. By this time, imperialism “had become the settled norm” (187), so entrenched and seemingly inevitable that, ironically, “the resistance to its irresistible sway [was] clarified and heightened” (187). At the very height of imperial power, resistance to it becomes ever more visible. From the “triumphalist” narratives of such work as Kipling’s Kim, a new pattern emerges with a distinctly modernist sensibility. Said identifies the “hallmarks of modernist culture” to include “extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality, and corrosive irony” (188). Thus, literary work begins to feel pressure to respond to the voices of resistance outside of the imperial capitals. Additionally, with communication and travel becoming easier and faster, foreign influences begin to reach the metropolitan centers: Picasso employs African “primitivism” in his visual art; E.M. Forster uses Indian protagonists in his novels; T.S. Eliot borrows from Eastern mysticism in his epic masterpieces.

In Said’s formulation, “Cultural texts imported the foreign into Europe in ways that clearly bear the mark of the imperial enterprise, of explorers and ethnographers, geologists and geographers, merchants and soldiers” (189). Suddenly, there is an acknowledgement that empire might not endure, and that an all-encompassing “consolidating vision” of the world might not come to pass. This is the challenge artists of the 20th century and beyond must confront.