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and progress of modernity; the late phase finally ushers in Conrad’s belief in the possibility of human love and communion to redeem the grim existence of modern men. In Daniel Schwarz’s study of Conrad’s later works, he stresses the
“continuities” of Conrad’s writing in “biographical, thematic, and formal” terms (Conrad: the Later Fiction 33). Instead of revealing a fault-line in his career, the later novels demonstrate an “evolution and development” of his early and major works, focusing on men’s epistemological loneliness and exploring men’s moral behavior based on communicative necessity and difficulty (Schwarz, Conrad: the Later Fiction xi). The great strength of Conrad’s later novels lies in their extension of the Conradian theme of men’s reaction to an “amoral cosmos” and their insistence on the paradox of humanism “tempered by skepticism and tentativeness” (Schwarz, Conrad: the Later Fiction 33). My study is not mainly concerned with Conrad’s psychological consciousness, or the psychoanalytic biography regarding his
transformed ethical vision along his writing career; but at best my attempt is to reflect his literary trajectory as a “sceptical humanist” who in his distrust of universal
goodness and his belief in the virtue of human love shows both the worst and the best of men in their inevitable fate to combat the loss and disasters of modernity. The next section will tackle with such dark sides of modernity in terms of its technological development and progress, and give some concrete examples of Conrad’s works.
II. The History of European Technology and Modernity
The advancement in technology and science in Western civilization is inextricable from that civilization’s overseas expansion in empire-building and commercial transaction. The advancement of communication technology such as steamship and the invention of weaponry facilitates the Western country’s penetration into other seas and territories to build up their colonial empire. The development of
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industry in the areas of domestic communication system and urbanization, and state administration also enables the expansion and consolidation of that civilization internally. Accordingly, the development of industry and technology is manifest in the Enlightenment culture of Western civilization externally (imperialist empire) and internally (state administration). The coordinating and pivoting area that combines those phenomena of modernity is the capitalist market system based on exchange value, which is a driving force that enables the European modernization to thrive and flourish since the beginning of Industrial Revolution. And it is just this coordinating concept of capitalism that links the violence of modernity with the pre-modernist violence. Most of the disasters of modernity are triggered by the competition of capitalist interests based on instrumental rationality and advanced technology, while the pre-modern violence tends to revolves around tribal warfare and its attempt to control over natural world out of pre-modern men’s rational calculation. Although the development of technology differentiates the violence of modernity from
pre-modern problems, the problems of the two periods overlap in their common reliance on the instrumental rationality and exchange value of capitalism.
In their tracing of the development of technology in Western history, T. K. Derry and Trevor I. Williams point out the mutual influences of political changes and technological revolution that created modern Western civilization (275-6). The historical facts of technological intervention in political events were manifested in international and domestic spheres. On the international level, technological development is inextricable from warfare such that every fruit of men’s invention seems to contribute to the “unending struggle for power which grew from intertribal to international politics” (Derry and Williams 706). The international wars among Western countries and the colonial conquests of Africa and the East in modern history testify to the interlocking relation of armament invention and the development of
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imperialism. In the domestic sphere, the improvements in transport and communications stimulate the activities of commercial trade and the thriving of capitalist market economy. The collateral consequences of the technological progress in domestic area also include the urbanization and the growth of big cities and the bureaucratization of the state administration. In Conrad’s novels, we can clearly identify the markings of technological development in both international and domestic spheres, often depicted in deprecating and skeptical lights. For example, the transportation medium of the steamship is used as a tool to facilitate the bloodless colonization of Africa in Heart of Darkness, and commercial engagement in the Far East disrupts the harmony of the native society in the Malay trilogy. The
urbanization of the Western cities foreshadows a standardized and dehumanized life under the modern regime as portrayed in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.
In Chance, speculation and calculation of the capitalist market set in motion the crash and bankruptcy of the financier and destroys his familial wellbeing. Lastly, the implicit problem of the “struggle of classes – social units that technology helped to form” (Derry and Williams 707) – is engendered by the fact of the capitalist
entrepreneur’s exploitation of the labor force as demonstrated by the disgruntling of the working class in Nostromo.
In History of Political Economy in Europe (1837), the French historian and economist Adolphe Blanqui invented the term “Industrial Revolution” to designate the rapid technological change and its social consequences that occurred during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Boon and Bud 8-13). The Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes in 1915 further coined the phrase “Second Industrial
Revolution” to characterize the rapid industrial movement facilitated by the use of chemistry and electricity during the closing decades of the nineteenth century (Boon and Bud 98-100). The “Industrial Revolution” is specifically associated with the
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widespread use of machine in manufacturing that had drastically replaced the manual labor. This period of rapid technological advance generated opposite views from different groups. For some, the blooming of factories and the dramatic change of human activities signal the coming of progress; for others, the heyday of the machine is concomitant with the decline of human spirit, arts and morality as well as the emergence of social tensions such as the protests voiced by the workers and social reformers (Boon and Bud 36). In Conrad’s works, he depicts the phenomena of industrial revolution and technological progress that are covered in areas as diverse as transport and communication, urbanization, state administration and capitalization – I shall discuss later in this section the incurred problems and consequences of which rendered by Conrad. The development of transport and communication includes the invention and access of railway and steamship, whose new transport routes stimulate the thriving of trade and promise the prosperity of the industrialized society (Boon and Bud 82). Specifically, railways establish the networks and necessitate
“standardization of time;” while the steamship facilitates the development of international trade. In the area of urbanization, elaborate urban planning was
designed, such as water supplies, sewerage, and electricity (Boon and Bud 46). The growth of cities attracted the attention of both pessimists who saw the underside of filth, disease, and poverty, and optimists who deemed urban development as the gateway to modern life (Boon and Bud 49). The capitalization of Western countries began with the growth of the international economy in the late nineteenth century that includes activities of international trade, investment and migration. During this period the most remarkable phenomenon is the emergence of multinational enterprises with the remarkable example such as the American corporation leading the world’s commercial activities and capitalizing the raw materials in far-away regions of the colonial settlement.
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In his study of the correlation between the “mechanical age” and war, Daniel Pick points out their polar roles to contribute to the “constitution of collective identity” and the “advance of ‘civilization’,” and to strengthen “war’s intrinsic capacity to undermine” (7). Given this fact, in the early nineteenth century both
“eulogies” to celebrate the might of technology and “diatribes” to denounce the devastating force of the “machine age” were commanding critical attention (Pick 175-6). This ambivalent attitude toward technology in the “machine age” is akin to the opposite voices in the early twentieth century uttered by Italian futurism and high modernism I have discussed in the Introduction. To dig into the question of “why war?” on the ground of the conjuncture of technology and warfare, Pick posits two explanations from modern European history – one is the “military-industrial complex”
to showcase European technological advances; the other is the issue of “human agency or responsibility” that lies behind the fact of racial desire and feelings of racial superiority (11). Certainly it is historically true that Britan takes the lead in
European Imperialism while France is hot on its heels and German left far behind during the nineteenth century. Therefore I should clarify the development of Britain and France during the course of history before plunging into taking the Germanic race as the prime example in the big picture of the war machine of European imperialist expansion. According to Pick, France suffered from martial defeat and consequent national degradation as early as the ancient time when the Celts of Gaul were
threatened by “Tartarian invasions by the Slavons and Teutons” (89). France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War once more testifies to “French degradation” and
“Teutonic ascendency” (Pick 90). As to the fate of Great Britain, her national history demonstrates the combination of “republican democracy” and “hereditary aristocracy” that entitles her to be the “savior of the European march of progress”
(Pick 91). Apart from the wax and wane of the British and French empires,
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Germany remains a relentless foe as exemplified by the political chapter written by Bismarck that confirms the “pugnacity” of the Germanic race (Pick 92-3).
Accordingly, Pick gives the example of Franco-Prussian War in the second half of the nineteenth century to analyze the aggressive nature of German and Prussian
nationality. The warfare engaged in by Germany is attributed to its warlike mentality and its technological merits – a combination of “war psychology” and
“machine mentality” that forms a “scenario of manipulation and power, but also a vision of anarchy and rampaging technology” (Pick 99, 110). Indeed, Pick also mentions Conrad’s vehement comments on the German national character and its relationship to martial affairs. Conrad’s concern lies in the distorted relationship between human beings and the machine, as well as the former’s recourse to war to survive characteristic of the political policy of the German state (Pick 105). For example, in “Autocracy and War” Conrad focuses on the evils of inter-European wars, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Russo-Japanese War for their disasters and catastrophe.
Conrad’s main target of accusation includes three Empires – German, Prussian, and Russian. He criticizes their engagement in the inter-European and colonial wars backed up by industrialism, commercialism and modern science:
Industrialism and commercialism – wearing high-sounding names in many languages (Welt-politick may serve for one instance) picking up coins behind the severe and disdainful figure of science whose giant strides have widened for us the horizon of universe by some few inches – stand ready, almost eager, to appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the earth has shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell or so.
(Conrad, NLL 107)
The European empires only tried to keep the façade of peace for the sake of “material interest” to hide their ready “preparedness for war as its ideal” (Conrad, NLL 107).
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In fact, in the literature review of war historians, Germany is seen as the “emblem of the modern state” with its rational and expansionist nature – an incarnation of “war machine” grounded on “irresistible weapon of political power and economic self-interest” (Pick 101).
Following this historical review, we can clearly grasp how Daniel Pick highlights the “tradition of war theory” to explain the Western history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We can conclude that back then war was buttressed by the conviction of “enlightenment rationalism” and the circulation of “natural sciences,”
which sheds light on the connection of technology and warfare along the course of Western civilization. If we take the argument a step further, it is possible to see that the influence of industrial technology reaches beyond the waging of inter-European wars to encompass the domination of Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century (Headrick 3). Instead of bringing civilization and enlightenment to the “dark places of earth,” Western imperialists rendered the East and Africa places of misery and cruelty through their mechanical power (Headrick 209). Daniel Headrick’s study of empire and technology underlines the fact that the development of new imperialism is linked with the prevalence of the idea of racism and that “Europeans … began to confuse levels of technology with levels of culture in general, and finally with
biological capacity” (209). In this complex web interwoven by war, technology and empire, we can identify the historical pattern of nineteenth-century European
civilization as “an age enslaved by its own ‘racial’ desires for conquest and war, armed with ever greater industrial destructive potential” (Pick 114; my emphasis).
J.A. Hobson has termed this racist and militarist drive the “psychology of jingoism,” a mindset produced in the civilized societies prompted by mass communications and urban experiences that causes the “neurotic disposition of the city dweller” (Pick 112).
In Conrad’s novels, we can find vivid examples of the complicity of the civilized
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minds and technology that contributes to the outbreak of war – such as the
confrontation between the tsarist officers and the revolutionaries shuttling between the metropolitan cities in Under Western Eyes; the civil war of a South American country intervened by the European colonialists and American capitalists in Nostromo; and the colonial war waged in the dark continent between the disarmed natives and the
well-equipped white colonizers in “Heart of Darkness.”
Finally we shall enumerate the technologies depicted in Conrad’s works and give concrete textual examples of their representation. But the details of the disastrous consequences brought about by the modern technology will not be fully explored until later in Chapter Two. The examples of industrial technology covered in Conrad’s works include the steamship, railway construction, mining, state administration, urbanization, and capitalization. The steamship is represented in many texts. In the Malay trilogy, Captain Lingard’s steamship navigating the trading posts in the Far East is an epitome of the British merchant marine, whose commercial activity represents the penetration of Western technologies and capitals into the native land that interrupts the harmony of the native society. Likewise, in Nostromo the European immigrants’/entrepreneurs’ setup of the OSN Company (Oceanic Steam Navigation Company) in Sulaco – the Occidental Province of the fabricated South American country, Republic of Costaguana – connotes the intrusion upon as well as control of the native state and nature by the technology of Western capitalist
enterprises. In Lord Jim, the steamships that we encounter in Jim’s former marine career, especially Patna whose accident destroys Jim’s career, are the embodiment of the instrumental rationality of the modern Western society that dominates and
standardizes the body and mind of the maritime labor forces. The maritime court’s arbitrary trial of Jim’s case of desertion furthermore exposes the dehumanizing effects of the culture of rationalization of modern technology. In “Heart of Darkness,” the
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warship and steamship emerging in the Dark Continent gloomily forebodes the exploitation and plundering of the native resources by the colonialists’ advanced technology.
The example of the railway appears in a couple of texts. In “Heart of Darkness” the construction of the railway serves as the façade of the “civilizing mission” based on science and technological progress. However, the absurdity and futility of the detonation at the construction site only reveals the fact of the
exploitation and torturing of the native laborers in the name of enlightenment and technological advancement. In Nostromo, the undertaking of the National Central Railway in Sulaco is endorsed by the local dictator, the web of which forms a complicity of Western technology, native state power, and European colonialists.
The omniscient narrator tells us that “the power of the local authorities [was]
vindicated among the great body of strong-limbed foreigners who dug the earth, blasted the rocks, drove the engines for the ‘progressive and patriotic undertaking’”
(Nostromo 24). In the cooperation of the OSN Company and the railway business, we can see the yoking of Western capitalist interests, technologies, and the native political power attempting to extract the most profits from the native land. In this novel we also have the most remarkable emblem of the modern technology – mining.
The history of the San Tomé mine in the Occidental Province tells the stories of atrocious exploitation of native slaves, exposing the dark and ugly side of modern technology coupled with capitalism. The American financier Holroyd, who in the name of civilization and religion, backs up and invests in Charles Gould’s silver mine business, and thereby taps into the rich resources of the native land blatantly. Mr.
Holroyd is the embodiment of the American capitalist government that intervenes in the political and economic activities of the South American states – “the head of immense silver and iron interests” veiled with the aura of the “religion of silver and
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iron” as the Goulds commented (Nostromo 49).
The example of urbanization is associated with the myth of the “Monstrous Town” employed by Conrad in many of his works, which is centered on a dichotomy between the city or town as oppressive and the countryside or nature as serene and soothing (Watts, “Conrad and the Myth of the Monstrous Town” 17-8). In The Secret Agent, London as a murky and densely-populated town corresponds to the theme of moral murkiness of the novel. In the modern cityscape, political intrigues are linked with modern technology as embodied in Vladimir’s plan to blow up the Greenwich Observatory – the symbol of the technological precision and
standardization of the clock-time of modern society. Consequently, the
technology-ridden political struggle in the public sphere shatters not only the bomber, but also the family unit pitilessly in the private sphere. In “Heart of Darkness,”
London is depicted as the ambiguous locus of light and enlightenment juxtaposed with gloom and benightedness. In light of Marlow’s tale, London is the heartland of the British Empire, which launched its colonial enterprise based on the dubious
banner of “civilizing mission.” Besides, the unidentified Continental city [Bruxelles]
as the headquarters of the Company engaged in overseas enterprise is depicted by Marlow as a “sepulchral city” immersed with its macabre and moribund atmosphere, and fraught with ignorant people living complacent life made possible by the overseas plundering of the colonial land. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad presents us with a pair of modern metropolises: St. Petersburg and Geneva. On the surface, there exists contrasting images of St. Petersburg as site of despotism and totalitarianism and Geneva as site of liberty, democracy and solidarity. However, when looked into deeply, both urban scenes are negatively depicted, exposing the flaws of tsarist autocracy and western democracy respectively. The modern urbanization of St.
as the headquarters of the Company engaged in overseas enterprise is depicted by Marlow as a “sepulchral city” immersed with its macabre and moribund atmosphere, and fraught with ignorant people living complacent life made possible by the overseas plundering of the colonial land. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad presents us with a pair of modern metropolises: St. Petersburg and Geneva. On the surface, there exists contrasting images of St. Petersburg as site of despotism and totalitarianism and Geneva as site of liberty, democracy and solidarity. However, when looked into deeply, both urban scenes are negatively depicted, exposing the flaws of tsarist autocracy and western democracy respectively. The modern urbanization of St.