Conrad’s Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance by Agnes S. K. Yeow (review)

In this study, Agnes Yeow focuses on the conversation between art and history in examining the representations of the Malay world in Joseph Conrad’s novels. She explores how Conrad’s Eastern vision

sets up a dialogue between two dominant and interacting purveyors of the ‘truth’, namely art and history. Conrad recognized that fiction and history are versions of the truth […] that fiction and history are dialogic and contesting voices which circulate inseparably. The dialogism of Conrad’s East resists any finalized meaning, just as the doubleness and dislocations within the narratives themselves work at rendering his Malay world decidedly open-ended.

(5)

Yeow is interested in the ways in which Conrad’s representations of the East embody a profound understanding of the changing historical, political, and social conditions that existed in the East in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. She sees Conrad’s art as in competition with, and as a supplement to, histories of the East. Yeow suggests that Conrad visited and wrote about the East in “an age where multiple versions of the East/Orient were being generated and endorsed by civil servants, painters, travel writers, scientists, anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, and novelists” and that Conrad’s works make a significant “contribution to a polyphony of narratives at a time of great historical flux” (7, 8).

For the most part, Yeow’s inquiry moves back and forth between passages of information—about British and Dutch colonial endeavors, Malay social structures and hierarchies, piracy and trade, and the complex mix of races and cultures in the East—and passages of commentary on Conrad’s understanding of these things as embodied in his fiction. Overall, the book contains more history—that is, specifically events and themes rather than the writing or representation—of the East and less actual analysis of Conrad’s style and thought. While the study of language and thought is central to my thought about Conrad, it is not for Yeow. For instance, she offers considerable detail about how “politics in the [Malay] archipelago is the story of seaborne empires founded on trade” and how the western colonizers “found it advantageous to view themselves as successors and inheritors of indigenous political paradigms” (46, 47). Except for a lengthy commentary on Lord Jim in Chapter 2 and a shorter analysis of Nina (from Almayer’s Folly) in Chapter 3, the book does not offer sustained, focused arguments about single works such as Victory or An Outcast of the Islands. Instead, Yeow uses passages from Conrad’s fiction when they relate to specific topics, such as the “historically significant” passage on Makassar—a notorious “smuggling Centre”—in the opening pages of Almayer’s Folly (55).

Each of the chapters is subdivided into distinct yet related sections. In the first chapter, “The Collision of Indistinct Ideas,” Yeow examines Conrad’s suspicions regarding facts, such as the colonial powers’ preoccupation with “real” Malay identity, and his skepticism regarding the value and significance of that concern. She also examines the politics of the sea trade and piracy especially considering the complications arising from the British- and Dutch-imposed changes on the traditional inter-Asian relationships. For instance, she explains in detail that piracy existed simultaneously with maritime trade and that “pirates played a significant economic and political role in the history of the region” (59). When the British and Dutch attempted to disrupt piracy, they were undermining a fundamental part of the orang laut (sea people) culture. In the first part of Chapter 2, “Patusan and the Malays”, Yeow suggests that Marlow’s narrative in Lord Jim “implicitly mimics the Malay hikayat”—a “genre which melds history and fiction” and an expression of “how the Malays viewed and recorded their past, their sense of history” (69, 70). The section includes, for instance, an examination of the meaning of “Tuan” in terms of Malay politics and how Conrad’s representation...