Conrad & the Anthropological

ELT 39:3 1996 Conrad & the Anthropological John W. Griffith. Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma: "Bewildered Traveller". Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. χ + 248 pp. $49.95 DESPITE THE TURN of the "new historicism" toward artifacts, sub-literature and other cultural disjecta membra, there is evidence of a return to the history of ideas as the key literary context. The trend of the 80s toward relating Conrad's works to Darwinian, Polish or other specific social thought has given way to a broader positioning of their burdens among the intellectual concerns of the times. Recent studies such as Brian Shaffer's, of literary expressions of the idea of civilization, and Christopher GoGwilt's, of Conrad's version of contemporary thought on Europe in the global world, stand, one hopes, as signs of the times. The renewed interest in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of imperialism, race and other currently hot topics is not untouched by what has been called "generational chauvinism," which finds our predecessors derelict according to our own more enlightened views. Yet even anachronistic scrutiny of intellectual activity must be considered a net gain if it avoids the Said tautology, which holds the literature and scholarship of the imperialist era to be complicit with it, by a logic imperial in its reductiveness. (If the work affirms imperialism, voilai; if it elides or fails to confront it, encore]—symptomatic evidence of evasion and cover-up.) John Griffith has profited from his studies at Oxford and elsewhere to produce a needed and interesting discussion of Conrad—particularly of "Heart of Darkness"—in the context of the developing science of anthropology. He has read widely not only in the appropriate period but in the later and most recent theoretical statements of the field's methodological concerns. These concerns—for the difficulty (perhaps impossibility ) of investigators from one culture in grasping the meanings in the behaviors of another; for the mental and moral stability of entrants (even of disciplined scientists) in alien milieux; for the Heisenbergian problem of the act of observation distorting its objects (in this case, involving not only hermeneutic but ethical distress )—have brought anthropology to what appears to the outsider, and to some insiders, a disciplinary crisis. Griffith's research indicates that these anxieties are already perceptible in the travel and scholarly literature of the fin de siècle, and that they are reflected in Conrad's great novella and other works. Indeed, when the author quotes later anthropologists like MaIinowski , Geertz and Clifford who cite the novella as paradigmatic, it 400 BOOK REVIEWS begins to seem that the influence of science and literature runs in both directions. Griffith puts the relation more cautiously: "Conrad's writing coincides with a transformation from Victorian to modern anthropology." The book's early chapters are devoted to enlightening contextualization of the "Heart of Darkness" cruxes. The first accounts for the (in)famous stylistic obscurity in foregrounding the Congo's perceived obscurity by making it an instance of the anthropological hermeneutics outlined above. Not only Conrad and Marlow but a host of previous and later observers experienced similar mystification, so that the story may be taken as their collective and definitive expression. The second chapter takes the disciplinary practices of the "participant observer" as a model by which to distinguish Kurtz's response to the natives from Mariow's; by obeying the fieldworker's imperative to enter into the ongoing life of the society s/he studies, the former exposes both the society and the self to degradation, while the latter retains the observer's distance if not detachment. The next chapter reviews the counter-current to Victorian progressivism , the vivid evidence of civilization's decline and painful doubts about the future that many of Conrad's contemporaries amassed. This context deepens the general understanding of Conrad's irony in his accounts of European civilization—although it will not assuage the wounds felt by readers like Chinua Achebe, who feel that acknowledging Western regression by comparing it to purportedly primitive Africa only sharpens the indignity. The fourth chapter describes the frame story's invocation of the Roman entry into Britain by way of the Thames—in parallel to the invasion of Africa...