Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce

Conclusion

Conclusion Czesław Miłosz once remarked that an “immigrant will often, for motives of self-defence, cut himself off completely from his land of origin or show toward it a friendly condescension, thereby contrasting his own success to the miseries of those left behind in the old country” (42). Instead of pity and nostalgia, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce expressed mostly critical and accusatory remarks about their nations, possibly in order to present themselves as irreproachable and their immigration as justified. While Conrad admitted that he could not change his “ultra-Slav nature” (Letters 2: 230), he sometimes complained about the Poles’ bad temper, bigotry, unreliability, and sloth.1 Joyce pointed to the paralysis, narrowmindedness , and blind loyalty to religious authorities among the Irish. Ever since he decided to “advance upon Europe with the missionary zeal (though not the piety) of his fellow Celts” (Ellmann, James Joyce 111), he thought about his flight from Ireland as a result of his nation’s betrayal of his genius. In his letter to Lady Gregory, Joyce confesses that everything is “inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And although I have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine” (Ellmann 111). Similar bitterness combined with defiance appears in Conrad’s response to his compatriots’ accusations of disloyalty. He insists that he has “in no way disavowed either [his] nationality or [his] name . . . for the sake of success” (Letters 2: 322), and explains: “It does not seem to me that I have been unfaithful to my country by having proved to the English that a gentleman from the Ukraine can be as good a sailor as they, and has something to tell them in their own language” (2: 323). But both authors circumvent the bitterness of rejection and, instead, expose the paralyzing effects of old, colonial grand narratives and the mythical patterns underlying popular description of the margin and the center, a contrived binary used by hegemonic powers to validate their injustice. 150 · Conclusion They investigate the patterns of movement within and across the confinements of essentialized categories. In their fiction, political writing, and letters, Conrad and Joyce describe the Congo, Costaguana, Poland, and Ireland always in relation to the artificially and forcefully constructed myth of the center. Although Conrad’s criticism seems to be rather selective due to his admitted Anglomania and social conservativism, both writers expose the audacious hypocrisy and sophistry in the strategies the imperial nations adopted to maintain power. Their forecast is rather grim: The subaltern can move in this fragmented milieu, even if their mobility is limited, but they do not seem to get anywhere. Since both the colonizers and the colonized have been positioned in the artificially constructed polarized world, both groups internalize in time the fabricated premises of the hegemonic order. The center is empty, precisely because of the fallacy upon which the entire myth is based: an assumption that the world should and can be successfully divided into spaces of being and non-being. Even if the subaltern were able to reach their destination, perhaps through circular movements gradually narrowing in on the center, they might simply perpetuate the same divisive binary rhetoric and exclusionary practices that previously kept them away from spaces of power. Joyce’s citizen and Conrad’s Costaguanians are examples of such internalization of violent power grabbing. Their erratic quest whose destination is, quite legitimately, the restoration of power is unfortunately preconditioned by the imperial culture and the paths it has drawn for them. The only characters who understand the pointlessness of this deceitfully independent, imitative progress toward the center of self-recognition, knowledge, and power are either the hateand resentment-ridden anarchists in The Secret Agent, especially the Professor , with his “perfect detonator” capable of blowing the center (London ) into pieces, or Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, with his call for love, “the opposite of hatred” (U 12.1485). Conrad and Joyce, therefore, draw our attention to the internalization of hegemonic practices. Conrad offers in response virtually no hope, no counternarrative that would not be simply a path of destruction. Joyce, however, gives the final word in Ulysses to Molly, a subaltern character, disenfranchised because of her gender and ethnicity, expressing vital assertions of life, harmony, love, and sensuality, even if her monologue is a staged performance of sorts. Similar patterns of pilgrimage, colonization, and the sacred appear...