Ian Burnet’s book, published this year, is a very welcome addition to a complex area of Conrad’s life and writing. It is a curious feature of Conrad studies that few Conrad scholars have been to many of the places in the region that feature in his Malay fiction, and it is refreshing to read a book that contains Burnet’s knowledge of Indonesia and of Singapore. This, and his sensitive response to Conrad himself, make themselves felt throughout the short book, a book that would be justifiably classed as suggested reading for any reader or student of Conrad’s works set in this part of the world.
The title and subtitle of the book relate to Conrad’s time in southeast Asia, although of the twenty-one chapters one deals with Conrad’s early life, one with Heart of Darkness, and two others with the Torrens and the Adowa respectively, chapters that nevertheless provide helpful context and background to the southeast Asian focus. The book combines studies of places or ships known to Conrad with chapters on the books set in Borneo that Burnet terms the “Borneo novels,” namely the Lingard Trilogy and Lord Jim. The author deals with the Lingard Trilogy in reverse order of publication so as, as the back cover states, “to make it easier for readers to discover or rediscover Conrad’s genius.” Burnet has published five other books about the history and culture of Indonesia and southeast Asia, of which in particular East Indies (2013) and Archipelago (2015) are also of interest to Conrad readers.
Given the extraordinary breadth of Conrad’s creativity, the very varied geography that he inhabited on land and at sea, and his eminent position in both English and world literature, there has always been a particular challenge to writing a relatively short work about his life and writing. It is no surprise, concise as these two books are, that Frederick R. Karl’s important Joseph Conrad, The Three Lives: A Biography (London: Faber, 1979) has over 1,000 pages, and that Zdzisław Najder’s masterly Joseph Conrad: A Life (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007) must have almost as many 48 words. To write a shorter book one possibility is biography, an approach adopted by Chris Fletcher’s Joseph Conrad (London: British Library, 1999). A literary-critical approach is another possibility. There is also the possibility of concentrating, as well as providing some biography and relating the stories of the chosen novels, on the historical and cultural context of the places that were significant in Conrad’s life and which influenced his writing.
This is broadly Ian Burnet’s approach with regard to Conrad’s time in southeast Asia, an approach ideally suited to explaining the nature of Conrad’s Asian experience. Conrad’s time in the Archipelago saw him in one of the less well-known parts of the world, even if Singapore had round-the-world tourists, somewhat negatively depicted in Lord Jim. But Conrad’s visits to Borneo on the Vidar saw him not just visiting but participating as a merchant marine officer in one of the least known places in the Dutch East Indies, or indeed in the world. Bearing in mind the links between Berau and the fictional Patusan, Marlow’s words in Lord Jim are particularly relevant: “This was, indeed, one of the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth; I had looked under its obscure surface; and I felt that when tomorrow I had left it for ever, it would slip out of existence, to live only in my memory till I myself passed into oblivion.” Although Burnet does not mention the gun-running or the transporting of slaves, some for human sacrifice, with which the Vidar was involved, nor the banned slave-trading in Gunung Tabor, something of the dangerous context of east Borneo is apparent. Territory such as Dutch Borneo was all too well described by the Dutch East Indies government as part of the “Outer Possessions,” with Berau especially being on the very edge of Dutch influence. In Lord Jim Jim describes Patusan as “a remote district of a native-ruled state, and the chief settlement bears the same name. At a point on the river about forty miles from the sea […].” The nearest Dutch official was the Assistant-Resident based in Samarinda over three hundred miles away, and the official register of male European residents in the Dutch East Indies for 1888 records a mere three names for Gunung Tabor, including, of course, “Olmeijer, C.”
Conrad’s Asian fiction represents perhaps a third of his writings, his Malay fiction a little less after excluding “Falk” (1903) and The Shadow-Line (1917) given that their settings are partly in Bangkok. This might suggest that writing a short work about Conrad’s life and his Malay fiction would be significantly less challenging than writing about Conrad and his entire oeuvre. But to grasp the nature of the challenge of the Borneo novels it is worth considering the particular nature of this part of Conrad’s life and writing from the points of view of the cultural, historical and geographical scope of the works themselves and of Conrad’s experience of the Malay Archipelago. Literary-critical writing about Conrad’s Malay Archipelago can show signs of an Anglocentric approach, by which British Singapore is accorded a special significance in the representation of Conrad’s Asian world, as if it were a center of gravity or central reference point. But Berau, although it is the central point of reference as the fictional Sambir and Patusan of Conrad’s Malay fiction, is only a part of a much wider Archipelago and southeast Asian cultural, geographical and historical context in which Conrad is writing, albeit largely a Dutch East Indies context. (Indeed, one would have liked to have had the benefit of more from the author about Tanjung Redeb itself, perhaps even from a visit there, given its iconic importance to the start of Conrad’s writing and its role as that central reference point.)
Burnet’s book is valuable not least because it reflects the extensiveness of these contexts. Macassar in south Sulawesi, for example, an important regional center for both Dutch and indigenous trading, figures accordingly in Conrad’s writing, even if it is a setting for only a little of his fiction. However, as Burnet writes, Conrad “knew Macassar well,” and that “it was here that the Vidar would unload most of their Singapore merchandise before sailing on to the Berau River to collect archipelago goods from East Borneo” (84), information that locates Conrad’s voyages within the reality of trade. Historical accounts of the town for the period show it as being relatively developed, at least from the colonial point of view, with a fine main street, hotels, Dutch clubs, and band concerts. As part of his description of the town Burnet quotes Alfred Russel Wallace’s account, and he sets out plainly the importance of the town and the origins and nature of its existence and trade, origins that he places in the indigenous history of the town before the arrival of the British East India Company and then of the Dutch East India Company, an historical approach that is a hallmark of his book which places Conrad’s voyages in a much longer continuum of history than that of Conrad’s voyages.
One of the ways in which Burnet achieves his aim is by means of numerous illustrations, including maps, and the 1883 view of Macassar’s port and quay is just one that helps the reader to picture the cultural and historical context of Conrad’s time in the Archipelago. Burnet summarizes the attraction of “non-Dutch foreigners,” including Conrad’s Lingard, to Macassar. The presence of the commercially significant Hudig in Macassar, as known to both Almayer—there in Hudig’s employ—and to the fictional Tom Lingard himself—one of those adventurers “who traded with Hudig in the daytime and drank champagne, gambled, sang noisy songs, and made love to half-caste girls under the broad verandah of the Sunda Hotel at night”—is made more real by the historical context provided by Burnet. Lingard is often portrayed in writing on Conrad in terms of his Singapore connections, but it is the portrayal of him in Macassar that is more important for Conrad’s portrayal of his character. Two equally wide-ranging chapters on Singapore provide a valuable description of that very influential town and city. A poignant and informative illustration of the “View of Singapore from the Harbour” shows the buildings on the water’s edge thirty years after Raffles re-founded the town in 1819, with the harbor adorned with two fine sailing 49 ships, but also with two of the fateful smoking steamships also just visible. The clear view of Government Hill with the early Governor’s Residence reflects that which Captain Whalley visited as a young man in “The End of the Tether”; the possibility of seeing the harbor from the hill has long since disappeared. These two chapters on Singapore link to a summary in the first chapter of the book of the impact of steam and the Suez Canal on trade between Europe and Asia, issues that are crucial to understanding the context to Conrad’s Asian writing, issues that can be seen particularly, for example, in “The End of the Tether.” Other related issues, such as the establishment of a regular steamship service between Britain, Asia and Australia, with their accompanying mail, are also covered. Burnet makes the good point about insurance premiums for freight carried by steamships being lower than that carried by sailing ships, as well as the ability of steamships to carry more freight, and the inability of sailing ships to negotiate the Suez Canal by sail, all of which worked in steam’s favor. Burnet also gives the crucial fact that by 1883 the tonnage of steamships had exceeded that of sailing ships for the first time, and that with the increasing size of steamships, the actual number of ships declined, leading to the loss of employment opportunities for men like Conrad.
For all that Berau features in writing about Conrad, its relation to local rulers and to the wider country around it, its economy as well as its history are often left unmentioned or shadowy by critics, and here Burnet’s approach in his chapter on East Borneo succeeds importantly in bringing the region to life and into its own proper perspective. Part of this perspective is Burnet’s account of the various Dutch and British government agents as well as adventurers and traders who visited this part of Borneo in the nineteenth century. George Muller in 1825, Edmund Belcher in 1844 and Carl Bock in 1879 came on behalf of their respective governments. James Brooke, the “White Rajah,” was a serious[1]minded adventurer, but the tendency towards power or in[1]fluence in both Brooke and the far less ambitious William Lingard was characteristic of the foreign arrivals, particularly evident in the cases of James Erskine Murray who arrived in 1844 to attempt to found a settlement, and Alexander Hare who in 1812 sought to establish nothing less than a kingdom near Banjarmasin. These traits are evident in Lord Jim, as Burnet reminds us: Jim who “had become, so to speak, a White Rajah,” controlling the settlement’s inhabitants to whom he ominously refers as “my own people” (152).
The highly critical sense of colonialism that emerges in Conrad’s writing has always been recognized, and another pleasing aspect of Burnet’s book is his unequivocal view that Conrad “became British but viewed the world from a non British perspective and was one of the first English writers of the period to pierce the popular assumptions of superiority that had grown up around the British Empire, colonials and colonial life” (7). That piercing is most evident in the Borneo novels in Conrad’s portrayal of Dutch colonial rule in the East Indies, but for Conrad it is the nature of colonialism that matters, not the particular colonizer. Conrad in his Author’s Note to Almayer’s Folly proclaimed the common humanity of all people, and as Marlow considers in Heart of Darkness: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complex[1]ion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing […].” Conrad’s piercing of notions of superiority is perhaps a slightly less surprising attitude for someone, as Conrad writes of himself in A Personal Record and as quoted by Burnet: “I verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations” (30). Jim’s three jumps stand as negative but key points in his career; Conrad’s, however, took him into another sphere for which his deracination created a new vision, one that could enable his readers too to see things differently themselves if they attended to Conrad’s writing. It was also a vision helped by Conrad’s being an “outsider” (7) made the more independent by, as Conrad’s uncle Thaddeus observed on Conrad’s gaining his second mate’s certificate, his “overcoming the difficulties that arise from the language itself and from your difficult position as a foreigner without any patronage to support you” (25). It would have been interesting to have included Victory and “The End of the Tether” in the book, given their Dutch East Indies settings, but they do not fall within the scope of the book’s subtitle, nor do they offer autobiographical readings as the four novels do that constitute the focus of the book. The editing could have been more thorough in places, especially when this leads occasionally to quotations from Conrad running in with Burnet’s text (e.g., p. 83, first paragraph); and the book—An Outcast of the Islands—from which one long quotation is taken (47) is not given. There are not always citations for quotations, and no page references. An index would also have been helpful even though the book wears its learning lightly and avoids an overtly scholarly style. Only rarely do imagined situations occur, as when Conrad is in hospital in Singapore and “it seemed impossible to recall the dreadful cold and snow of Amsterdam” (34).
These points are in the broader picture minor reservations. Burnet’s book is not literary-critical, and it makes no pretence to being so. His confident and wide-ranging contextual account, combined effectively with his relating of the plots and features of the Borneo novels themselves, provides a powerful sense of the lived reality through which Conrad passed and on which he drew. This enables the reader to gain a reliable grasp of the enormous achievement of Conrad’s Malay fiction in its systematic engagement with a culture not his own but of significance to at least “all of Europe”—like Kurtz—for its interpretation of historical roots in a world that colonialism relentlessly and cruelly changed, and for its portrayal of the human condition through the characters that Conrad portrays inhabiting such a world. Burnet quotes the well-known comment by Henry James to Conrad in 1906 that: “No one has known—for intellectual use—the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached” (57). “The whole matter” is a phrase potent in its conciseness and significance, and Burnet’s book skillfully provides an insight into part of the whole matter regarding the Archipelago that often remains obscure.
Andrew Francis
