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6 Contacts and Transgressions On the beach: Denationalization and Stevenson in the Pacific This chapter will consider some cases of the transformations that result from contact between Western people and Eastern places, and in particular the theme of transgression in the Orient, in the figure of stepping across from one world to another; cases of what seems to be a surrender, voluntary or not, to possession by the spirit of a foreign place. We shall see that tropes of contact, involving as they do a potentially perilous crossing from one world to another, seem often to involve a modal contention between realism and romance, and their respective regimes of representation. In February 1903 Hugh Clifford published A Free Lance of Today, his adventure story about ‘a masterful son of the dominant race’ whom ‘circumstance and inclination had combined well-nigh to denationalize’.1 We will return to this novel. But the theme of denationalization was very much on Clifford’s mind in an essay on ‘The Art of Mr. Joseph Conrad’, published the previous month in The Living Age, reviewing Conrad’s volume of three tales, ‘Youth’, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and ‘The End of the Tether’. The climax of Clifford’s essay is his generous praise for the centerpiece of this triptych, ‘Heart of Darkness’ — ‘this wonderful, this magnificent, this terrible study’ of ‘[t]he denationalization of the European, the “going Fantee” of civilized man’.2 It is worth looking closely at Clifford’s portrait of Conrad the artist in this review essay. Description unquestionably is his forte, and the most remarkable of his gifts is the power which his strength in this direction gives him for the absolute creation of atmosphere. He is a realist in that he writes of a real world which he has seen for himself with his own eyes; but he 1. Hugh Clifford, A Free Lance of Today [1903], 2nd edition (London: Methuen, 1928) 8. 2. Hugh Clifford, ‘The Art of Mr. Joseph Conrad’, Living Age 236 (January 1903), 122. P117-158 08/4/23, 16:10 117 118 Eastern Figures rises superior to the trammels of ordinary realism because he has not only looked long and thoughtfully upon land and sea, so that he can write of them with the truth and certainty born of sure knowledge, but because also he has caught the very spirit of them, and has the art so to breathe it into his pages that his readers become imbued with it too.3 This suggests that for an author like Conrad, writing is above all a matter of the relation between subject and place, though for Conrad as for Clifford the places are remote — the East, the high seas, central Africa. To speak of the power to capture the spirit of a place is a cliché of book-reviewing, no doubt. What makes it interesting in Clifford’s essay is that he is dealing with a Conrad story, ‘Heart of Darkness’, which is about the opposite — the power of a place to capture the spirit of a person, ‘the power of the wilderness, of contact with barbarism and elemental men and facts, to effect the demoralization of the white man’. The barbaric and elemental is a zone of risk, of high profits and commensurate dangers. Contact sets in motion a drama of possession, in the economic but also the spiritual sense; you may seek to master the dark places, like Conrad, but they may end up mastering you, as happened to Mr Kurtz. Conrad, says Clifford, has the power to tell the truth about alien places; but in ‘Heart of Darkness’ it is the wilderness that tells the truth about Kurtz, whispering to him things about himself that he did not know, so that, as Clifford puts it, ‘it comes to pass that when at last he [Kurtz] is met with, the reader finds that he is utterly in accord with his surroundings,’ the denationalized European now a naturalized citizen of the darkness.4 What balance is struck or lost, what mastery exercised, between the person and the place alien to each other? The drama played out to one conclusion in ‘Heart of Darkness’ is played out to another in A Free Lance of Today, and again and again in stories about the East. Not only Western incursions in the East, but history itself, told a story of contact between individuals, nations and races which left no party unaffected. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Comte...

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