Abstract
The characteristics of the world of the Malay archipelago as represented in Conrad’s first Malay novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, are commerce, mobility, and cultural diversity. It is a world of nomads and travellers, traders and conspirators, adventurers and pirates.1 The novels foreground the material conditions of trade and the historical circumstance of ‘piracy’.2 Chapter 1 of Almayer’s Folly, which describes a Macassar ‘teeming with life and commerce’, introduces the historical rivalry between European adventurers and Malay ‘pirates’:
It was the point in the Islands where tended all those bold spirits who, fitting out schooners on the Australian coast, invaded the Malay Archipelago in search of money and adventure … not disinclined for a brush with the pirates that were to be found on many a coast as yet …3
Chester, in Lord Jim, is a later example of these Australian adventurers: a ‘West Australian’, he had been ‘pearler, wrecker, trader, whaler, too, … anything and everything a man may be at sea, but a pirate’ (LJ, 161).4 It is Lingard, however, whose entry into what is, in effect, a ‘Lingard Trilogy’, is anticipated in these words, and Lingard’s career through the three volumes, in which he moves steadily to centrestage, progressively problematises the initial opposition of European ‘adventurers’ and Malay ‘pirates’.
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Notes
For an account of conspiracy in Conrad’s fiction, see Teng Hong-Shu, ‘Conrad and Conspiracy’, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of London, 1999.
Contrast, for example, John C. Hutcheson, The Penang Pirate (London: Blackie & Son, 1886), which, despite its title, actually features Chinese pirates.
The ‘fight with the sea-robbers, when he rescued, as rumour had it, the yacht of some big wig from home, somewhere down Carimata way’ (OI, 14) encapsulates what was to become The Rescue. ‘Rumour’, of course, hasn’t quite captured the full picture. The historical William Lingard rescued a Dutch man-of-war stranded on a reef in 1869 and destroyed a fleet of ‘Lanun pirates’ in 1875. (Hans van Marle, ‘Jumble of Facts and Fiction: The First Singapore Reaction to Almayer’s Folly’, Conradiana 10.2 [1978], 161–6, 165–6.) The fictional Tom Lingard was in alliance with the ‘Lanun pirates’.
See Robert Hampson, ‘“The Genie out of the Bottle”: Conrad, Wells, Joyce and The Arabian Nights’ in Peter L. Caracciolo (ed.) ‘The Arabian Nights’ in English Literature (London: Macmillan/New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), 218–43.
Sobhana Kumaran, ‘The representation of the colonial subject in Rudyard Kipling’s Indian fiction and Joseph Conrad’s Malay novels’, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of London, 2000. A similar appropriation – although it can hardly be seen as an act of resistance – is Mrs Willems’s use of one of Almayer’s books as a clothes-hook (OI, 301).
See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 181ff; hereafter cited as IL.
Whereas the historical Olmeijer was Eurasian, it is implied that both of Almayer’s parents were Dutch. William Thorn, in The Conquest of Java (London: 1812), noted that, in 1812 at least, ‘with very few exceptions, that which is emphatically called the Mother Land, or Mother Country, is only known by name, and this is particularly the case with the Batavian women, few of whom are Europeans by birth’.
John Splinter Stavorinus, in Voyages to the East Indies (London: 1798), had commented on Dutch men with Asian or Eurasian wives, who, ‘when they went back to Europe’, often took the children with them, while leaving the wife behind.
K. S Maniam, The Return (1981; London: Skoob Pacifica, 1993).
The Location of Culture, 2. However, by ‘performance’, I would not want to suggest a voluntarist subject creating an identity through instrumental action. As Butler puts it, ‘performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act”, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (Bodies That Matter, 2). It is ‘a process of reiteration by which both “subjects” and “acts” come to appear’ (BTM, 9). Similarly, when I refer to ‘hybridity’, I use it to mean not so much a mixing (as in the organic hybrid) as a contestation (as in Bakhtin’s account of the novelistic hybrid). See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981), 360.
Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), edited by J. H. Stape and Hans van Marle, Introduction by J. H. Stape, xxiv; hereafter cited as Stape.
For the rhizome, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988), 3–25.
See Cedric Watts, The Deceptive Text: an Introduction to Covert Plots (Sussex: Harvester, 1984), 47.
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Letter to Jane, 1972.
See Negara, 89–91, 204–5; A. K. Nielsen, Leven en Avonturen van een Oostinjevaarder op Bali (Amsterdam, 1928), cited in Negara, 206.
Alice Meynell, ‘Decivilised’, National Observer (24 January 1891), reprinted in The Rhythm of Life (1893) and as Appendix to Almayer’s Folly (Everyman, 1995), 190–2, to which all references are made.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 35; hereafter cited as IC.
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© 2000 Robert Hampson
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Hampson, R. (2000). Cultural Diversity and Originary Identity: Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands . In: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598003_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598003_5
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