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FANTASIES OF RACE: THE SYMBOLIC ECONOMY OF
SUBJECTIVITY IN BRITISH COLONIAL LITERATURE

presented by

Timothy M. Christensen

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F ANTASIES OF RACE: THE SYMBOLIC ECONOMY OF SUBJECTIVITY [N
BRITISH COLONIAL LITERATURE

By

Timothy M. Christensen

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial ﬁilﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2004

ABSTRACT

F ANTASIES OF RACE: THE SYMBOLIC ECONOMY OF SUBJECTIVITY
IN BRITISH COLONIAL LITERATURE

By
Timothy M. Christensen

This dissertation addresses the intimately connected problems of community and
racial difference in early modernist British texts. It offers an examination of the various
ways that the constitutive excess of the modern subject marks certain bodies, which are,
as a result of this process, racialized. Beginning with a comparison between Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume One, I argue that because
the commodity materializes the foundational disjunction between the incommensurable
logics of consumption and production, it seems to contain the seeds of a boundless desire,
unconstrained by natural limitations. I then examine the particular strategies of
containment of this potentially disruptive desire within Conrad’s text, arguing that the
touch of the commodity metonymically constructs African bodies under the European
gaze as a series of bodily stigrnata that are coextensive with the semiotics of racial
science. I extend this analysis through an examination of three of Conrad’s stories of the
sea, The Nigger of the “Narcissus, ” “Youth,” and “The Secret Sharer.” Aligning the
logic of capital with the Lacanian logic of subjectivity, 1 demonstrate that in each of these
stories the formation of an ideal community of sailors depends upon the abjection of a
single black body, which is racialized through the reiterated performance of its violent
exclusion. I continue with an inquiry into concept of “the Law” in H. G. Wells’s The
Island of Dr. Moreau, in which I contend that “race“ acts as a form of imaginary

containment for the disavowal of the performative foundation of subjectivity. I extend

this analysis through a comparison of Wells’s use of certain key terms of racial discourse
with their use by Edward Tylor in Anthropology and Francis Galton in Hereditary
Genius. I conclude with a discussion of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. I focus my analysis on
Kipling’s imaginative construction of a white identity that embraces the performativity
inherent within the modern problematic of subjectivity. Kipling envisions a performative
identity that thrives on the production of a rigid racial hierarchy, exposing the potentially

oppressive aspects of such an identity.

Copywright by
TIMOTHY M. CHRISTENSEN
2003

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: CULTURE AND RACE ............................................................ 1

CHAPTER 1: FANTASIES OF RACE, PART I: MARX, CONRAD, AND THE COMMODITY
.................................................................................................................. 21
CHAPTER 2: FANTASIES OF RACE, PART II: THE LIMITS OF CONRAD’S FANTASY OF
RACIAL COMMUNITY .................................................................................. 56
CHAPTER 3: THE “BESTIAL MARK” OF RACE ................................................... 96
CHAPTER 4: THE PERFORMATIVITY OF WHITENESS IN KIM ............................ 126
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................ 1 56
ENDNOTES ............................................................................................... 163

WORKS CITED .......................................................................................... 171

Introduction: Culture and Race

Why should we continue to study “race” in British literature? Hasn’t race become
a reiﬁed category, rigidly contained within the mantra of race, gender, and class? If race
has been largely displaced in contemporary discourses, both popular and academic, by
the supposedly more ﬂuid concept of “culture,” wouldn’t the study of culture, as opposed
to race, provide a more dynamic and nuanced ﬁeld of inquiry — one not limited to the
repetitive criticism of an outdated social Darwinism? After all, for at least twenty years
there have been constant and inﬂuential investigations into the signiﬁcance of “cultural
studies” for the study of literature. In a recent issue of Modernism / Modernity, for
instance, Rita F elski argues that “cultural studies” must be understood as one of three
main intellectual orientations within the study of literary modernism, alongside “the
sociology of literature and culture” and “political formalism” (504). The term “culture”
within the rubric “cultural studies” obviously means many things, and the very polysemia
of the term seems to promise a rich ﬁeld of inquiry to anyone who is willing to take the
time and effort to carefully study the complexity of the political, economic, and social
articulations that the term contains. While there have been a number of substantive
inquiries into the role of race in the formation of “national” literatures over the same
period of time, and while the boundary between the concepts of race and culture is
frequently blurry, it is signiﬁcant, I think, that nothing going under the name of “race
studies” or any similar designation can claim the inﬂuence of cultural studies. Why?

The purpose of raising this question is not simply to suggest that a particular
concept of culture should be replaced by that of race within literary studies, nor is it to

engage in a general criticism of the ﬁeld of cultural studies, which is beyond the scope of

this project. Rather, it is my belief that in order to explain how the concept of race can be
productively applied to the study of British literature, we must deﬁne the often unspoken
connection between race and culture. In a recent article in PMLA, Shu-mei Shih
examines a variety of contemporary uses of the term “culture” employed in various
attempts to deﬁne “world literature.” Shih argues that the concept of culture has been
effectively commodiﬁed within a system of global exchange so that it effectively
conceals relations of domination within multinational capitalism by transferring “politics
to the realm of the apolitical so that the economic ends of global capitalism are achieved”
(23). Shih contends that within the global exchange economy,
Culturalization now substitutes for racialization, so that the trauma of race and
racism can be sidestepped and the political potential of rupture based on a clear
delineation of racial oppression is disenabled. Race becomes culturalized to such
an extent that it all but disappears, even though it continues to structure
hierarchies of power. (23)
In this passage, Shih argues that within the current global economy “culture” effectively
denotes a strategy of disavowing “hierarchies of power” that are more directly expressed
in the term “race”: “culturalization substitutes for racialization” in such a way that the
“political potential of rupture” that characterizes race is effectively obscured in favor of a
reiﬁed and static entity that loses the potential to disrupt the smooth ﬂow of commodity
exchange. The implied relationship of race to global capitalism, in this equation, is one
of both generation and suppression: within Shih’s argument the success of multinational
capitalism depends not only upon the production of racial difference, but additionally

upon the concealment of this technology of power under the term “culture.” The

relationship between race and culture suggested by Shih, according to which race names
a methodology of power and culture names its ideologically predominant form of
disavowal and containment, is a productive starting point for articulating the link between
the concepts of culture and race.

In order to begin to complicate and expand this connection between culture and
race, and to begin to place it historically in terms of British modernism, I will turn to an
episode from E. M. F orster’s A Passage to India. In this novel, the plot of which centers
around the alleged attempted rape of an Englishwoman, Adela Quested, by an Indian
man, Aziz, Forster offers an anatomy of how the construction of racial difference sustains
(and ultimately disrupts) colonial power in British India. The debacle between Adela and
Aziz begins when she accompanies him to view the Marabar Caves outside of
Chandrapore, which she believes will allow her fulﬁll the wish “to see the real India”
(24). Adela’s search for authenticity is immediately problematized, however, for we
learn that Aziz has never been to the Caves although he has spent his life in Chandrapore.
In this way, the Caves are shown to be a destination for English tourists rather than an
integral part of the lives of Indians, a revelation that seems to qualify the viewpoints not
only of the characters, but even that of the third person omniscient narrator, who
introduces the Caves as the only “extraordinary” feature of Chandrapore (7). The very
mention of the Marabar Caves therefore exposes a fundamental dissonance within inter-
cultural communication. The fact that the illusion of omniscience in the narrative
viewpoint is disrupted with the mention of the Caves points to the fact that this is not a
superﬁcial dissonance that can be overcome with the discovery of a transparent means of

communication. Rather, a fundamental opacity within language, which is experienced by

the characters as an impenetrable silence within intercultural communication, is shown to
be the deﬁnitive feature of cultural identity within A Passage to India.

The Marabar Caves function as a central spring for the action of the novel, for it is
from the enigma of the Caves that the alleged rape and consequent trial that structure the
plot emerge. If the Caves act as a center for the action of the plot, however, they are
clearly an absent center, or a feature that does not represent or refer to anything outside of
itself, but rather resists signiﬁcation altogether. This characteristic is manifest ﬁom the
ﬁrst mention of the Caves in the story; when Professor Godbole and Aziz are asked to
explain the attraction of the Caves to Adela, they confront a strange silence, an inability
to describe the Caves at all. Signiﬁcantly, Aziz experiences this silence, this resistance
within language to meaning when he attempts to articulate the signiﬁcance of the Caves,
speciﬁcally as an inability to communicate with the English. Aziz, realizing that both he
and Godbole are struck silent when they attempt to explain the mystery of the Marabar
Caves to their English visitor, can equate this silence only to the resistance to
transparency that he encounters when trying to communicate with his English superior,
Major Callendar: “The Major accused him of disingenuousness, and was roughly right,
but only roughly. It was rather that a power he couldn ’1 control capriciously silenced his
mind” [italics mine] (76).

Callendar, we discover, similarly experiences an impermeable resistance within
language in his interactions with Aziz that deﬁnes all of his attempts to communicate
with Indians. Callendar, we are told, “only knew that no one ever told him the truth,
although he had been in the country for twenty years” (54). The “truth” is inaccessible to

Callendar in all of his interactions with his Indian subordinates, a fact that he attributes to

some inexplicable dishonesty in all Indians in every situation. Indians, for Callendar, are
always concealing a secret; “there’s always something behind every remark [an Indian]
makes” (33). Furthermore, the cultural Other who always seems to be concealing an
essential truth for some unfathomable reason returns to us a displaced image of ourselves.
In A Passage to India, the recognition of oneself in the ﬁeld of the cultural Other is
always shown to be a misrecognition, in which some essential feature, the very thing that
deﬁnes the truth of one’s being, is withheld or concealed. As the narrator explains of one
of Callendar’s descriptions of Aziz, “it was all true, but how false a summary of the man;
the essential life of him had been slain” (34). In such instances, a certain displacement
that takes place within intercultural communication is ultimately shown to be constitutive
of cultural identity for both Callendar and Aziz; the symbolic economy of cultural
identity is set in motion with the misrecognition of both the Englishman Callendar and
the Indian Aziz within the ﬁeld of the (cultural) Other. The primordial split of
subjectivity that is reﬂected back to each man due to an opaque quality of language is
shown to be a moment of cultural differentiation in the setting of colonial India; the
Englishman and the Indian each encounter a hard core of persistent and stubborn
resistance to transparency within language, and it is ﬁom within this space of resistance
that each receives his image from the Other.

Both Aziz and Callendar experience this resistance within language as a strange
power outside of their control, or as a silence that imposes itself upon them. And while
both of them encounter this strange silence during attempts to communicate with the
cultural Other, this feature of intercultural communication is later given both a more

universal and a more speciﬁc signiﬁcance. It is given a more universal signiﬁcance when

the Caves are ﬁnally described by the omniscient narrator, prior to Aziz and Adela’s day-
trip. The hills that contain the Caves are themselves “primal,” for “they bear no relation
to anything dreamt or seen” (123; 124). They even resist the label “uncanny,” because
this term “suggests ghosts, and they are older than all spirit” (124). The Caves are an
absolutely primordial presence, excluded even ﬁ'om the possibility of haunting, or the
return of something dead, excluded, or repressed, because they are both chronologically
and logically prior to the existence of history and meaning. Thus,
the visitor returns to Chandrapore uncertain whether he has had an interesting
experience or a dull one or any experience at all. He ﬁnds it difficult to discuss
the caves, or to keep them apart in his mind, for the pattern never varies, and no
carving, not even a bees’ nest or a bat distinguishes one ﬁ'om another. Nothing,
nothing attaches to them, and their reputation — for they have one — does not
depend upon human speech. [italics mine] (124)
The Caves precede history and language, for they contain “no carving,” no sign of human
existence or even life of any sort. They cannot be distinguished from one another, for the
very process of self-differentiation would suggest the possibility of meaning — one of the
Caves might be set in relation to another — and as is frequently reiterated, the Caves
cannot be made to signify. Furthermore, “if mankind grew curious and excavated,
nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good or evil” and the Caves have “nothing
inside them” [italics mine] (125). As the very repetition of the word “nothing” indicates
— ﬁrst we are told that “nothing attaches to them,” then that they can add “nothing” to the
sum total of meaning, then that there is “nothing inside them” - they are pure absence,

and therefore cannot be differentiated and set in relation to themselves or anything else.

They are described only in terms of negation — what they lack, what is absent. Even the
description of their physical shape is described in these terms, for they have “neither
ceiling nor ﬂoor” (125). The Caves are “empty,” “hollow”; a Marabar Cave “mirrors its
own darkness in every direction inﬁnitely,” and can do nothing else (125). The Marabar
Caves designate a space of absence that refers to no prior presence; because there was
nothing there before them, they resist even the possibility of being haunted.

In the form of the Marabar Caves, the stubborn opacity that Aziz encounters in his
attempts to communicate with the English is given a more universal signiﬁcance. The
Caves, which are the occasion for the failure of language that Aziz experiences when
speaking with Adela, are elaborately described as an absolutely primordial void — prior to
culture, prior to history, prior to meaning, prior to human life or to life of any sort. The
Caves themselves, to the extent that they materialize this void, both within the geography
and the language of the novel, might be understood as a narrative objet petit a. Lacan
explains the objet a as “a privileged object, which has emerged ﬁ'om some primal
separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real” (Four
Fundamental Concepts 83). The Marabar Caves, within A Passage to India, manifest the
primal lack from which both signiﬁcation and the subject emerge, but which is in itself
absolutely resistant to meaning.

The central failure within language that deﬁnes Aziz’s relationships with all of his
English acquaintances (even the sympathetic Fielding), and which is manifested by the
Marabar Caves, is also given a more speciﬁc meaning, however, for within the early
twentieth-century colonial India of the story, this disruption within meaning is met with a

very particular ideological construct: racism. Upon entering the Caves, Adela is

disconcerted by their effect of reducing all sound to an identical, indistinguishable
“boum.” As her guide explains to her, “to shout is useless” when inside one of the Caves,
for “a Marabar cave can hear no sound but its own” (154). Encountering this noise,
which is described as “before time” and “before space also,” this void upon which
meaning shatters and within which all sound including her own voice literally becomes
nothing but an inﬁnitely undifferentiated echo, Adela ﬂees from the Cave (208). Her
panic upon encountering this primal “boum,” this manifestation of nonsense, is very
easily explained by her English compatriots: they determine that Aziz attempted to rape
her. Adela, within the cultural imaginary of English racism, is transformed into “an
English girl ﬂash from England,” while Aziz becomes the manifestation of the obscenely
appetitive racial Other, to whom Adela’s ﬁance, Ronny Heaslop, sacriﬁces all of his
enjoyment — including, in this case, the sexual enjoyment that he claims as his own from
Adela (165). Ronny, having once sacriﬁced his pleasure, or rather having given up his
claim to it and claimed it in the same gesture, refuses to accept it in any other form: when
Adela tells him that Aziz never tried to rape her, he tells her that she is hysterical. When
Adela insists that Aziz is innocent, Ronny responds that “the machinery has started... it
will work to its end” (206). Ronny has no real desire to claim Adela’s virginity. It is
rather the sacriﬁce of her virginity to Aziz to which he is committed. Furthermore, he
realizes that this sacriﬁce sustains the “machinery” of British imperial justice. If Ronny
is said be intelligent because of his intuitive understanding with the machinery of colonial
rule earlier in the novel, in this passage Ronny’s commitment to an economy of sacriﬁce

to the racial Other is shown to fuel this machinery.

Ronnie is, perhaps, the character most representative of the enthusiastic
imperialist within A Passage to India because of the youthful zest with which he
participates in the game of cultural identity formation. Like Callendar, Ronny believes
that Indians are for some inexplicable reason resistant to the notion of truth. “Every
day,” we are told, Ronny “worked hard in the court trying to decide which of two untrue
accounts was the less untrue, trying to dispense justice fearlessly, to protect the weak
against the less weak, the incoherent against the plausible, surrounded by lies and
ﬂattery” (50). But Ronny, unlike Callendar, draws a sustaining pleasure from the
continual confrontations with this impenetrable Other that are required of a colonial
magistrate. It is, ﬁnally, the self-satisfaction that Ronny reveals when discussing his
unappreciated sacriﬁces on behalf of native Indians that his mother ﬁnds so repellant. As
he explains, the strange demands of dealing with a group of people that one cannot
possibly understand requires that he continually respond to these demands out of an
embittered sense of “duty,” since he no longer expects “sympathy” from those he serves.
Mrs. Moore, his mother, cannot help but observe:

How Ronny reveled in the drawbacks of his situation! How he did rub it in that

he was not in India to behave pleasantly, and derived positive satisfaction

therefrom... His words without his voice might have impressed her, but... she
heard the self-satisﬁed lilt of them. . . she saw the mouth moving so complacently

and competently. . . One touch of regret from the heart... would have made him a

different man, and the British Empire a different institution. (51)

Ronny enjoys his perpetual confrontations with unfathomable Indians, and it is this

feature which makes him a competent colonial magistrate. He takes pleasure from an

economy of renunciation, in which he repeats a sacriﬁce —- expressed here as his
surrendered right to sympathy -— to a colonial Other — or the Indian plaintiffs and
defendants who plead their cases before Ronny — each time he performs his “duty.” This
pleasure is expressed, in this passage, as an “intelligent and embitte ” self-gratiﬁcation
that he receives from the performance of his duty as magistrate, and which is,
furthermore, thought by his mother to be characteristic of “the British Empire” as a whole
(51). Ronny experiences the Indian Other to whom he sacriﬁces his pleasure as what
Slavoj Zizek has termed “the subject presumed to enjoy,” as an Other that claims all
pleasure for itself (Sublime Object 186).

This aspect of Ronny’s character, according to which he extracts pleasure from
the constant sacriﬁce of his enjoyment to an Indian Other who is therefore supposed to
contain a limitless, horrifying jouissance, is underscored following the alleged rape
I attempt. It is, ﬁnally, Ronny, rather than Adela, who places himself ﬁrmly in the space
of enjoyment created by the psychic economy of sacriﬁce that seems to characterize the
efﬁcient operation of the British colonial machinery. “Miss Quested,” we are told, “was
only a victim, but young Heaslop was a martyr; he was the recipient of all the evil
intended against them by the country they had tried to serve; he was bearing the sahib’s
cross” (185). Ronny claims for himself the status of “martyr” that is out of reach for
Adela, who is merely a “victim,” and the difference between the two positions seems to
be entirely contained within Ronny’s attachment to sacriﬁce which is, here and
elsewhere, equated more or less directly with his Englishness. When Ronny bears “the
sahib’s cross,” he is, within this formulation, assuming the position representative of all

“sahibs,” or whites, in colonial India; he is forgoing his own rightful claims to enjoyment

10

in the name of the greater good, bearing the white man’s burden as his attempt to “serve”
is met not only with ingratitude, but with something more inexplicable and absolute,
“evil.” This sacriﬁce elevates him to the position of a “martyr” for whiteness.

Whiteness, within A Passage to India, is constituted through this economy of sacriﬁce. It
exists as a form of identity only to the extent that it speciﬁes a particular relationship to
the traumatic kernel in language that resists signiﬁcation: that of sacriﬁcing one’s
pleasure to the Other.

Within F orster’s novel, we therefore witness the development of a speciﬁc, if
implicit, idea of race, and its relationship to a national, or cultural, identity. Culture
designates the symbolic level of existence of the English in colonial India, the level of
signiﬁcation on which the English might converse about their national characteristics as
they sit in the whites-only club that is the hub of English social life in the novel. It is on
this level that we witness the creation of a national symbol in the form of a “young
mother — a brainless but beautiful girl,” whom the Anglo-Indians consign to permanent
residence in the club in case “the ‘niggers attacked’” (180-81). They do so, although
there is no reason to believe that she will be singled out for an attack, because “she
symbolized all that is worth ﬁghting and dying for” (181). In other words, the young
mother represents those aspects of the national character that deﬁne Englishness. Race,
on the other hand, speciﬁes the imaginary relationship of the English to the traumatic
kernel of the real. If the real designates that “space” within language that gives birth to
the process of symbolization while itself resisting all signiﬁcation, race is the sacriﬁcial
psychic economy through which this absence — represented throughout A Passage to

India as a failure of intercultural communication — is both disguised and effectively

11

utilized. Race therefore names the presence of the traumatic kernel of the real within the
(cultural) realm of the symbolic. Ronny becomes emblematic of this imaginary
relationship of sacriﬁce to an Other obscenely satiated with jouissance when he becomes
a “martyr,” thereby assuming the pleasure of the white man’s burden and becoming the
exemplary sahib, or white man, in the process.

Race, in A Passage to India, names an imaginary construct through which the
British colonial culture constitutes and sustains itself. The Marabar Caves, representing
the primal absence around which identity is formed, become the spring of action in the
novel not as a symbol, but as a central absence to which “nothing attaches,” which
contain “nothing inside them,” or which have no meaning and to which no meaning can
be attached. Yet it is from this primal abyss, and speciﬁcally in reaction to the terrifying
“boum” that reduces all meaning to the level of an equivalent, asignifying sound, that the
charges of rape appear. Race sutures this originary absence with a set of stereotypes that
allow colonialists to maintain their attachment to an imaginary Other, whose inﬁnite
sexual appetitiveness both conceals and reveals the abyss at the center of their identity,
and who allows this central lack to be utilized for the purpose of colonial oppression: in
Ronny’s formulation, it fuels the “machinery” of the colonial order. Ziiek’s deﬁnition
of race seems appropriate here. The “real” he states,

is the unfathomable remainder of the ethnic substance whose predicates are

different cultural features that constitute our identity. In this precise sense, race

relates to culture as the real does to the symbolic. “Real” is the unfathomable X

that is at stake in the cultural struggles... [T]here must be some X that is

12

“expressed” in the cultural set of values, attitudes, rituals, etc., that materialize our

way of life. (“Love Thy Neighbor” 169)

Race, in Ziiek’s formulation, is the equivalent of the real of culture, the excess or
“remainder” of the symbolic representation of ourselves that cannot be symbolically
digested. It is the traumatic core of cultural being, both the product and the origin of any
given culture, that cannot be assimilated into the symbolic order.

The particular symbolic order portrayed in A Passage to India operates according
to an economy of renunciation, not unlike the economy of “civilization” described by
Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud, writing on the eve of Hitler’s rise to
power, perhaps could not help dwelling on a cultural economy of renunciation very
similar to the British colonial psychic economy dissected by Forster. Freud begins his
seventh chapter with the question “What means does civilization employ in order to
inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it?” (83) In
answer to this question, Freud discovers not a system of rendering an instinctive
aggression innocuous, but a cultural apparatus that produces aggression as a necessary
condition of its self-production. Like Forster’s colonial India, Freud’s civilization
operates through renunciation:

Conscience (or more correctly, the anxiety which later becomes conscience) is

indeed the cause of instinctual renunciation to begin with, but that later

relationship is reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic
source of conscience and ﬂesh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and
intolerance. . . [W]e should be tempted to defend the paradoxical statement that

conscience is the result of instinctual renunciation, or that instinctual

13

renunciation... creates conscience, which then demands further instinctual

renunciation. (90-91)
Within this formulation, renunciation, originally the minimal condition for the co-
existence of people within the structure of society, transforms itself from a means to an
end (much like Marx’s exchange value detaches itself ﬁ'om use value to form its own,
incommensurable system of valuation). If conscience generates renunciation,
renunciation paradoxically seems equally to generate and sustain conscience, the
elemental unit of the symbolic order. Renunciation is therefore both the source of
conscience and its end, in the sense that it “becomes the aim and vehicle of satisfaction”
(Butler, Psychic Life of Power 143). Renunciation ﬁnally names a system of recycling an
aporia at the logical origin of “civilization” in such a way that civilization can continue to
re-create itself. If race, as Ziiek states, names the remainder of the symbolic production
of a culture, in A Passage to India it speciﬁcally names the remainder of a symbolic
economy of renunciation. Aziz plays the role of the racial Other saturated with obscene
enjoyment, to whom Ronny demands to sacriﬁce his own claims to pleasure. When the
prosecuting attorney, Mr. McBryde, “sadly” remarks “that the darker races are physically
attracted by the fairer, but not vice versa,” he states the essential case against Aziz (218-
19). The fact that this statement causes “the ﬁrst interruption” within the court
announces the approach of the real, or the uncomfortable proximity of the remainder of
the sacriﬁcial economy, the residue of a system of oppression (219). The jeering and
native laughter that accompanies the statement of this “fact which any scientiﬁc observer
will conﬁrm” amounts to an irruption of the real within the very sanctuary of symbolic

production and control, the imperial courtroom (219). Racial difference has announced

14

its presence, and it is both the locus of control (McBryde’s scientiﬁc proof of the
inﬁnitely appetitive racial Other, which he seeks to convert into law) and the potential
site of a destruction of the very symbolic order that it sustains (represented by the jeering
and laughter of Indians, which disrupts the legal proceedings and ultimately announces
the failure of the case against Aziz).

It is this dual valence of race, as both a sustaining feature of oppression and a site
of disruption for this same oppression, that Shu-mei Shih believes is obscured by the term
“culture” within the logic of multiculturalism in such a way “that the trauma of race and
racism can be sidestepped and the political potential of rupture based on a clear
delineation of racial oppression is disenabled” (23). Race in both of these senses serves
as the focal point of my examination of early modernist British colonial literature in this
dissertation. More speciﬁcally, I will examine the ways that the cultural logic of
imperialism creates and re—creates race as a condition of its own operation. In this
dissertation, I focus on the works of Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling,
three authors who persistently confront “race” as the traumatic kernel of the real within
colonial culture, and develop an incredibly diverse set of attitudes, narrative postures, and
fantasies in order to provide various types and degrees of suture for these irruptions of the
real. In doing so, I hope to emphasize both the multiplicity of forms that race takes in the
era of the global expansion of industrial capitalism and its ﬂexibility and adaptability to
varied ideological and disciplinary constructs. Such a project is necessary both to explain
the persistence of race as a system of oppression up until the present day, and to obtain
even an elemental grasp of the dynamics of identity formation in the era of the global

expansion of industrial capitalism.

15

In chapter one, I compare two novels by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and
The Nigger of the “Narcissus, ”with Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume One. Through a
reading of Capital, I argue that capitalism sets in motion a systemic logic according to
which the commodity comes to embody the incommensurability of the logics of
production and consumption. Because the commodity materializes the foundational
disjunction that is the condition of existence of capitalism, it seems to contain the seeds
of a boundless desire, unconstrained by any natural limitations. Establishing parallel
concerns over the destructive logic of capital in Marx and the two novels by Conrad, I
examine the particular strategies of containment of this potentially disruptive desire
within Conrad’s texts. I consider the way the touch of the commodity metonymically
constructs African bodies under the European gaze as a series of bodily stigrnata that are
coextensive with the semiotics of racial science. In this section, I focus speciﬁcally on
the way that the touch of the commodity constructs two female bodies in Heart of
Darkness: Kurtz’s “savage and super ” Aﬁ'ican mistress and his white ﬁance, “the
Intended” (56). I argue that the African woman is given a deeply corporeal physical
presence through intimate contact with the fetish objects of colonial trade, while the
European woman attains a disembodied aesthetic transcendence through an impossible
detachment from these same objects, as when she is described as “ﬂoating” through a
room heavily encumbered with the knick-knacks of imperial plunder (68). In this
analysis of the relation of black and white female bodies to the commodity, I discuss how
the differential interpellation of these bodies creates a space of disembodied whiteness

that is the condition of both aesthetic transcendence (in relation to the “barbarous”

l6

African arts, which are deﬁned by the fetishistic qualities of the commodity) and the
creation of the domestic sphere as the stronghold of “civilization.”

I extend this analysis in chapter two through an examination of three of Conrad’s
stories of the sea, The Nigger of the “Narcissus, ” “Youth,” and “The Secret Sharer.”
Aligning the logic of capital with the Lacanian logic of subjectivity, I demonstrate how in
each of these stories the formation of an exemplary community of sailors depends upon
the abjection of a single black body, which is racialized through the reiterated
performance of violent exclusion. Focusing on the characters of James Wait in The
Nigger of the Narcissus and Abraham in “Youth,” I examine how this reiterative
embodiment of the single black sailor on each ship is performed through torture: Wait
undergoes the ceaseless torture of disease, while Abraham is battered by a storm, “the
sole purpose” of which, it seems to the narrator, “had been to make a lunatic of that poor
devil of a mulatto” (125). I conclude this chapter with an analysis of “The Secret
Sharer.” In this story, Leggatt, who appears mysteriously on board the ship of the
unnamed protagonist, turns out to be ﬂeeing prosecution for murdering a sailor on his
own ship. Drawing on Conrad’s personal correspondence, I show that Conrad based this
story on an actual incident that involved the murder of a black sailor by a white officer.
By excising this fact from “The Secret Sharer,” I argue that Conrad produces a narrative
in which his quest for an imaginary communal unity eliminates the black body of the
earlier stories at the price of producing an uncanny doubling within the main character. I
read this excision as an attempt to theorize ideal community in the absence of the
racialized body that exposes the limitations of the historical horizon of possibilities

within which Conrad wrote.

17

I continue this deconstruction of the concept of race in chapter three through an
inquiry into concept of “the Law” in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, which
allegorizes the origins of human society. I contend that the quasi-religious social law in
this novel is reiteratively produced through the surgical torture of Moreau’s humanized
animal subjects, who are marked with the physical stigrnata of this torture. These
physical stigrnata mark the “beast folk” as somehow incomplete and imperfect, and come
to represent “something that I cannot touch” for Moreau. Moreau is struck with the
obsessive desire to “burn out all of the animal” from the beast folk in order to create
“rational creature[s] of my own” (89). Moreau’s obsessive desire to create subjects who
are completely accessible to his rationality takes the form of a scopic drive, or a wish to
isolate the constitutive excess of his subjects in an object within the ﬁeld of vision, and
then eliminate it, to literally cut it out of their bodies. In doing so he hopes to create
purely rational, self-identical creatures. Moreau’s inevitable failure in this pursuit results
in the endless surgical torture of his subjects which, in turn, gives rise to and sustains “the
Law.” Moreau employs the vocabulary of racial science to describe the physical stigrnata
that mark the beast folk as incomplete, or not ﬁrlly accessible to his scientiﬁc rationality.
I argue that race, in Moreau, therefore acts as a form of imaginary containment for the
disavowal of the performative foundation of subjectivity. I conclude the chapter with a
comparison of Wells’s use of certain key terms of racial discourse with their use by
Edward Tylor in Anthropology and Francis Galton in Hereditary Genius. I argue that
Tylor and Galton’s texts employ these terms in the same fashion as Moreau, as these
terms provide all three texts with a form of imaginary suture for the constitutive rupture

that creates subjects under “the Law.” In other words, race provides an imaginary

18

structure for envisioning the mythological beginnings of society in the emergent social
sciences, as well as in Wells’s science ﬁction.

I conclude my dissertation with a discussion of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. In this
chapter I focus my analysis on Edward Said’s claim that the “conﬂict between Kim’s
colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions is unresolved not because Kipling
could not face it, but because for Kipling there was no conﬂict” (146). Said’s contention
has been the subject of many poststructuralist critiques. Such critiques ﬁequently claim
that Said’s formulation of a seamless ﬁt between Kim’s work as a spy in the service of
the British empire and Kim’s sympathetic understanding of the Indian people whom he
works to subjugate ignores the fundamental ambivalence of Kipling’s representation of
white colonial identity in Kim. Against these critiques, I argue that Said is essentially
correct because the ambivalent structure of white racial identity does not necessarily
reveal a secret weakness in Kipling’s vision of whiteness; the ambivalence of white
identity is, in fact, the engine that drives the production of racial difference in Kim, and,
in doing so, fortiﬁes the wall of empire. Because Kim embraces the performative
element of racial identity, Kipling’s text produces a type of whiteness that is not
threatened by its own performative excess. I argue that Kipling understands something
that many contemporary critics do not: that an identity such as Kim’s, which embraces
its own foundational excess is not, in and of itself, invariably disruptive of rigid social
hierarchy. Kipling instead recognizes that a being such as Kim is an integral and even
necessary part of even the most oppressive society. I argue that the critic therefore must
recognize the dialectical process of identiﬁcation that is at work in Kim. By

acknowledging the dialectic of identity, rather than reductively isolating one aspect of it

19

as poststructuralists often do, we are able to understand not only the liberatory

possibilities of performativity, but its potentially oppressive aspects as well.

20

Fantasies of Race, Part I: Marx, Conrad, and the Commodity

A number of contemporary critical evaluations of Joseph Conrad’s writing focus
on theories of language evident throughout his large body of work. Critics as disparate as
Ian Watt and Fredric Jameson have asserted that the preface to The Nigger of the
Narcissus is, in some substantial way, the inaugural document of literary modernism due
to the ideas regarding language and representation that it sets forth.1 In a particularly
astute recent reading of The Nigger of the Narcissus, Michael North provides an
interesting variation on this argument. North contends that the tension created between
the preface and the novel itself is what marks this novel as uniquely “modern.” In the
preface, Conrad makes the claim that his goal in writing the novel is “to make you hear,
to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see!” (N. N. xlix) Yet, North feels that
this wish for writing that would convey such a degree of sensual immediacy is at odds
with the content of the novel, which he believes underscores the “structural
impossibility” of conveying “a full sensory experience” through the medium of
“sensually unrewarding marks on a paper” (North 38). In other words, the wish
conveyed in the preface for a kind of writing that could duplicate “a full sensory
experience” and therefore ground meaning in the senses is set in ﬁmdamental opposition
to the content of the novel itself, which repeatedly conveys the “structural impossibility”
of such a goal and reafﬁrms a radical indeterminacy of meaning. For North, it is
precisely this tension that deﬁnes literary modernism. North’s analysis of Conrad’s
continual effort to exorcise the indeterminacy of meaning from language by ﬁrmly

grounding language in a sensually immediate experience will, moreover, form a starting

21

point for my own argument. In this chapter, I will focus on the relationship between
Conrad’s concern with the promiscuous multiplication of meanings, expressed in
exemplary form throughout his writing, and the construction of “race” in the modern
sense as a semiotics of the body.

There exists a tension in The Nigger of the Narcissus between the wish for a
language capable of conveying important sensual truths and a fear of the impossibility of
attaining this goal. This tension is expressed through a focus on “the asignifying aspects
of language” that hold forth the possibility of “phatic communion” (North 51; 54). The
promise of an experience of solidarity that bypasses the mediation of the construction of
meaning and in doing so achieves an immediacy of experience that can be expressed only
in terms of its sensual impact is repeatedly disrupted, however, by the existence of
linguistic and cultural baniers, for “nothing is more particular, less easily translatable,”
than the asignifying aspects of language (47). According to North, this disruption is
consistently ﬁgured as racial difference within The Nigger of the Narcissus, expressed as
both the auditory disturbances of the rhythms of the ship provided by Wait’s death
groans, and in the visual register as the inscrutable black mask that is Wait’s face: “a
nigger does not show” (N. N. 32). Within this reading, both the black voice and the black
body become symbols that absorb the central contradictions of a modernist theory of
language, and this fact substantially explains the uncanny irnpenetrability of the black
voice and the black body within Conrad’s writing.

Starting from the critical commonplace that the Niger of the Narcissus
articulates a very modern concern with a certain structural impossibility within language,

North adds a crucial emphasis on the role of the black voice and the black body in

22

Conrad’s construction of this concern. What interests me most in this analysis is that we
might redirect it in such a way that it would allow us to interpret the role of the black
body as that of a suture for the foundational structural lack of signiﬁcation. In other
words, the black body comes to occupy the place of the immanent impossibility of the
very project of “perfect communion,” or the achievement of a perfectly self-identical and
uniﬁed community. The black body becomes a fetish, simultaneously denying and
embodying the central structural impossibility of Conrad’s desire for a language that
enables perfect, unmediated communion. I would argue that if Conrad is a “modern”
writer, it is not only because he expresses a modern set of concerns about language and
identity; additionally, it is because he articulates this concern in a characteristically
modern way, through the medium of the black body, which becomes the “racialized”
body to the extent that it serves as a placeholder for the constitutive structural lack of the
subject.

As such, we might understand the black body and the black voice within The
Nigger of the “Narcissus” not only as disruptive presences; more particularly, we might
interpret the black voice and body within this work through the paradigm of the veil
provided by Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, which is
explained through the classical myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasios. During a competition
between the two artists to ﬁnd out who could paint the truest representation of nature,
Zeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds tried to eat them. Parrhasios, in turn, painted a
curtain so realistic that Zeuxis asked him to remove it so that he could see the fantastic
painting that he supposed was hidden underneath. In painting the veil, Lacan writes,

“Parrhasios makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him

23

is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it”
(112).

Wait’s face, in The Nigger of the “Narcissus, ” seems to play a role parallel to that
of Lacan’s veil. Described as “inscrutable” and as “a repulsive mask” when he ﬁrst
appears aboard the Narcissus, it seems to hide some important truth (12-13). Wait
becomes an object of fascination aboard the ship as crewmembers constantly try to
discover his “secret,” but are never satisﬁed with any information that they bring away
ﬁ'om an interview. This apparently insatiable desire to discover something supposed to
be concealed behind Wait’s impenetrable features eventually causes an insurrection on
the Narcissus, which is set off when Wait demands to return to work, only to have his
demand refused by the captain. The fact that the men rebel, however, is not simply a
result of the belief that Wait has been faking his sickness and should have been working
all along or that he has been sick but has recovered from his illness and therefore
deserves to return to his duties; rather, the rebellion seems to result from the refusal to
accept any ﬁnal determination regarding Wait’s condition. It is therefore only when the
captain ﬁnally officially pronounces Wait to be ill that the crew engages in rebellion.
The crew’s cries of outrage indicate a continued irresolution regarding Wait’s illness,
varying ﬁ'om “‘We have been hymposed upon this whole voyage,” implying that Wait
was never actually ill, to “‘a sick chap ain’t allowed to get well in this ‘ere hooker?”
implying that Wait actually was ill and should therefore now be allowed to return to work
(89). As the confusion increases, the men deteriorate into “gesticulating shadows that
growled, hissed, [and] laughed excitedly” (89). In this scene we therefore see Wait not

only as a disruption, but also as a sort of necessary disruption, which enables the

24

formation of the same ideal society that it menaces. Conrad’s community of shipmates is
alternately described as “the brotherhood of the sea,” indicating the ship’s utopian
possibilities, and as “a fragment detached from the earth,” indicating that it is an entire
society in microcosm (21). This society deteriorates into an anarchic mob when it is
threatened with the loss of its central fetish, Wait, who is therefore shown to be not only a
disruption of Conrad’s ideal society, but a condition of it as well.

The veil of Wait’s face, of course, conceals no secrets. The symptoms of illness,
which on Wait’s body take on an uncanny quality, turn out to be nothing other than
symptoms of illness. Here we have a case of a veil, an uncanny mask that hides nothing
other than the illusion that it hides something. When Wait’s death seems immanent and
obvious is when the crew displays the greatest confusion regarding his illness.

Moreover, at such times, Wait comes to ﬁguratively embody the sea, as when the
narrator tells us that “the nigger’s cough, metallic and explosive,” echoed through the
forecastle. Immediately afterwards, we’re informed that the “unceasing whisper of the
sea ﬁlled the forecastle. Was James Wait ﬁ'ightened, touched, or repentant?” (28). The
sea, we might once again note, is the backdrop of Conrad’s ideal “brotherhood” (21). As
such, Wait comes to serve, at the very instances in which his physicality becomes most
uncanny (and, characteristically, mechanical), as a particular embodiment of the abstract
condition of community; at such moments Wait’s body or voice comes to occupy the
same space as the ﬁgure of the sea. In F etishism and Imagination, David Simpson notes
that in Conrad’s work “there yet remains one image that is outside the control of the
fetishized imagination and beyond complete conﬂation with the idols of trade.” This

image is “the sea, the image of completion, the repository and synthesizing medium of all

25

created forms” (120). To complete Simpson’s explanation of Conrad’s image of the sea,
we would need to add that this ideal image absorbs all the contradictions inherent in
capital into itself. It provides a perfect synthesis, “the resumption of totality and the
abolition of difference,” the achievement of a self-identical “prelapsarian consciousness,”
which is a ﬁgurative construction giving imaginary form to the kemal of the real that
allows symbolization to take place (120). This collapse of the sea, one of Conrad’s most
enduring ﬁgures, into Wait’s voice, is a further indicator that in this instance his voice
becomes the placeholder of the real: it becomes the equivalent, within Conrad’s ﬁctional
universe, of the Lacanian objet a, the material object that embodies and conceals the
central structural lack that is the condition of communication (and therefore community).

The black body and black voice as presences that disrupt (and in doing so enable)
communication are found throughout Conrad’s work. We might note, for instance, the
role of asignifying noise in Heart of Darkness. It is almost omnipresent throughout
Marlow’s journey up the Congo River. Marlow explains that as he and his crew
“penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness... the roll of drums behind the
curtain of trees would run up the river and remain, sustained faintly, as if hovering in the
air high over our heads” (31). This strange sound, brooding over the boat throughout the
journey, impossible to locate in a particular time or place, seems to embody Marlow’s
enigmatic description of the African landscape as “an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention,” and it culminates only at the end of the journey in the “strings of
amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language” spoken by the Africans
standing guard over Kurtz’s camp (30; 62). It is from this backdrop of primal,

asignifying noise that meaning arises when Kurtz’s voice emerges from the “satanic

26

litany” of the Aﬁican crowd; it represents the perpetual deferral of the revelation of
perfect communion and sensual immediacy somehow promised by the entity of Africa.

This noise that both promises perfect meaning and deconstructs the possibility of
achieving meaning at all is matched by an overabundance of visual signs that are able to
denote only their lack of historical reference. His attempt to visually unlock meaning is
as inconclusive as his effort to decipher African language because Conrad’s Aﬁica is a
land devoid of intelligibility, representing “the night of ﬁrst ages, of those ages that are
gone, leaving hardly a sign” (32). We thus discover something fundamentally
contradictory in Marlow’s very attempt to tease meaning out of the African landscape, for
we must accept at once that it somehow gives Marlow the impression of an incredible
surfeit of meaning, yet accomplishes this creation of excessive meaning without recourse
to intelligible signs of any sort, for it is a remnant of the pre-historic ages that have left no
signs. In other words, Africa promises revelation without conveying meaning because
meaning is made possible only by the history that has yet to touch Africa, leaving its
marks of intelligibility. Thus, Aﬁ'ica confronts Marlow with “truth,” but “truth stripped
of the cloak of time” (32).

This radical indecipherability characterizes not only the landscape and language
of Africa, but the bodies of Africans as well. More particularly, we might note that with
a few exceptions in the story, Marlow encounters black bodies only as indeterminate
masses of limbs and body parts, as in the famous “grove of death” scene that marks his
arrival in Africa. Similarly, as Marlow travels up the river, he encounters black bodies
primarily as indistinguishable masses of limbs and body parts. Thus, he witnesses an

African village as “a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of

27

feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling” (32). What is particularly revealing in
this scene is that when Marlow turns his attention from this mass of humanity to an
Aﬁican working on his boat we witness an individual body taking shape from this mass
of limbs, being assembled around the engine of the boat. The genesis of “the savage who
was ﬁreman” begins with the observation that
He was an improved specimen; he could ﬁre up a vertical boiler. He was there
below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a
parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs. A few months of
training had done for that really ﬁne chap. He squinted at the steam gauge and at
the water gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity - and he had ﬁled teeth, too,
the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three
ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands
and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall
to a strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he
had been instructed, and what he knew was this — that should the water in that
transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry
through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible vengeance. (33)
As the man tends to the boiler and squints at a gauge, we get the ﬁrst indication that he
has individual features. The physical particularity that emerges from this operation as an
individual body is intelligible only as a series of signiﬁers of the nameless crewman’s
Africanness, or, more speciﬁcally, his cannibalism. Thus, it is ﬁrst his “ﬁled teeth” that
materialize, followed by “the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three

ornamental scars on his cheeks” (33). In noting that the person who emerges in a

28

concrete particularity from this proximity to the machine is only a series of signiﬁers of
cannibalism (or a seemingly absolute otherness), we might recall Chinua Achebe’s
insight that the only message that Conrad’s Aﬁ'icans are able to convey is that they are
cannibals; all else is either silence or unintelligible sound (Achebe 9). Thus, even in
taking individual shape, the only message that the African can convey to Marlow is a
reiteration of absolute difference, or unintelligibility.

This nameless man’s appearance fails to resolve the violent ambivalence that is
inspired in Marlow by the “ugly” and “passionate uproar” of the African village, that he
seems able to describe only in purely negative terms (“that was the worst of it - this
suspicion of their not being inhuman”) [italics mine] (32). The strange and awful
demand for revelation unmediated by signiﬁcation merely seems to be transferred from
the “veil” of the Aﬁ'ican landscape to the “mask” of the African face (42). The features
of the face, like the landscape, seem to convey only absolute, unassimilable difference
(recall that “a nigger does not show”). The fact that the coalescence of the face in
connection with the boat fails to resolve this ambivalence, fails even to resolve the issue
of the Aﬁican’s humanity that is raised in the scene, makes Marlow immediately wish
him back onto the riverbank, where he might again become merely a gathering of limbs
among a sea of identical limbs, where he would fade into the assemblage of “clapping. ..
hands” and “stamping. .. feet” (33). The man seems to maintain a stubborn presence
within Marlow’s consciousness, however, as long as he is “hard at work, a thrall to
strange witchcraft” (33). Thus, as soon as he appears in conjunction with the “vertical
boiler,” his facial features materialize. As soon as these features materialize, however,

Marlow wishes his dismemberment and replacement on the bank. This wish is met

29

immediately, however, with an image of the man working at the boiler, which once again
causes the features that mark him as a cannibal to reappear (this time in the form of “a
piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck ﬂatways through his lower lip”) (33).
The violent ﬁgurative ambivalence that characterizes this scene indicates that the Aﬁican
body in this scene, as in the case of Wait’s black “mask” in The Nigger of the Narcissus,
serves as a sort of placeholder of the real, as an objet petit a. The features that cannot be
stabilized on the body and that materialize in different configurations only to
dematerialize, appear in the text as tokens of absolute unassirnilability, as signifiers
which cannot be assigned a stable place within the text. His features can only be
scrutinized or approached at the expense of further violent mutations, yet cannot be
wished away or eliminated. The African commands Marlow’s attention despite the fact
that he does nothing but engage in the most mundane chores.

In order to unpack the implications of the racialized body in Conrad’s work,
however, it is not sufficient to show the central necessity of such bodies to Conrad’s
formulations of complementary concepts of community and alienation. In order to
expand this reading, I would like to call attention to two speciﬁc aspects of this scene: the
ﬁrst is the fact that the rapid vacillation between a ﬁgurative dismemberment and re-
memberment of the black body takes place in conjunction with its relation to the
steamboat. The second is the dominant focus on the fetishism of the African, through
which Marlow attempts to make two apparently unassimilable elements, an African and
modern European machinery, correspond. These two features both indicate the
conspicuous connection between (1) the creation of the black African body as a

standardized series of signiﬁers of absolute difference and (2) the movement of capital

30

within Conrad’s work, represented in the previous scene by one of the fetish objects of
capitalism, the machine.

The machine, in this case, is the material embodiment of capital, functioning as a
sort of medium through which fears and anxieties regarding the question of agency in a
capitalist society are inscribed on certain bodies as racial characteristics. These racial
characteristics, then, are the marks of uncertain agency under capitalism, physically
inscribed on these bodies through a process resembling Frazer’s “magic of contact.”2
Through physical contact with the fetish objects of capitalism such as machines (in this
case, the steam engine of Marlow’s boat), black bodies are assembled as agglomerations
of signiﬁers of absolute difference. As such, they both materialize and conceal the
process by which bodies are interpellated under industrial capitalism, embodying the
constitutive / impossible limit of this system.

The process through which bodies are inscribed with a semiotics of race has
nothing to do, then, with an empirical realization that clusters of “natural” differences are
accurately signiﬁed through characteristically “racial” features. Rather, racial bodies are
both the result and the condition of a particular set of social relations set in place under
industrial capitalism. The creation of racial bodies, then, both conceals and enables the
production and reproduction of such social relations by providing a site at which
anxieties that are endemic to such a society are controlled. Mark Seltzer provides a
succinct explanation of this basic process when he argues that questions of individual
agency arising from the cultural contradictions internal to the “machine culture” of late
nineteenth-century America require “deeply embodied bodies” as “ﬁgures through which

these tensions can be at once recognized and displaced or disavowed” (64). Within the

31

work of Conrad, as well as a great many other turn of the century British writers, the
deeply embodied bodies produced by industrial capitalism are frmdamentally racialized
bodies.

Our focus, then, on the formal centrality of race to Conrad’s irnaginings of ideal
community within the space of the ship leads us to an examination of the question of
individual agency within a society structured by the exchange of commodities. Therefore
we must examine the connections between Conrad’s representations of the movement of
commodities over bodies and landscapes and his textual construction of racialized bodies.
If we pursue this course of argument, we invariably discover that the racialized body
consistently owes its textual formation to an attempt to resolve anxieties concerning the
economic rule of capital. In order to make this argument, I will focus on how bodies
identiﬁed by the taint of the boundless desire of the market are almost without exception
racialized either implicitly or explicitly, and on how such racialized bodies are often
interpellated through direct physical contact with machines and other fetish objects of
capitalism, as though the taint that deﬁnes racialized bodies followed the logic of the
magic of contact.

To begin this line of argument, we should take note of the striking formal
similarity between the creation of racialized bodies through contact with the fetish objects
of capitalism in Conrad and the interpellation of the bodies of the proletariat in Marx’s
deﬁnitive nineteenth-century explanation of capitalism, Capital, Volume One.
Throughout this work, Marx devotes considerable attention to the careful articulation of
how the creation of a “surplus value” divorced from a ﬁnite economy based strictly on

human need creates a situation in which desire is artiﬁcially inﬂamed to limitless

32

 

3‘1“?

FE

 

proportions. Thus, in the section of Capital in which Marx attempts to deﬁne “the
general formula for capital,” one ﬁnds a reversal of the formula according to which the
product of labor takes precedence over the medium of exchange. An economy based on
the desire to exchange one commodity for another, in which once the exchange takes
place the need is satisﬁed, is perverted into an economy in which the commodity
becomes the middle term in the exchange of different quantities of money. Such a
system takes as its purpose not the satisfaction of ﬁnite needs, but the accumulation of
money, which knows no natural boundary. Therefore, the
repetition or renewal of the act of selling in order to buy, is kept within bounds by
the very object it aims at, namely, consumption or the satisfaction of deﬁnite
wants, an aim that lies altogether outside the sphere of circulation. But when we
buy in order to sell, we, on the contrary, begin and end with the same thing,
money; exchange value; and thereby the movement becomes interminable. (151)
The system of exchange that takes the commodity as the middle term, rather than as the
beginning and end of the exchange, therefore creates the “vocation to approach. . . as near
as possible to absolute wealth” (151). The creation of “surplus value” within a system
that deﬁnes the capture of surplus value as its purpose thus creates a systemic logic of
limitless desire. No matter how much surplus value one is able to capture, there is always
an excess of surplus value that escapes capture, that persists beyond the grasp of the
capitalist. Thus the “restless never-ending process of proﬁt making,” the “passionate
chase aﬁer exchange value,” or the “never-ending augmentation of exchange value”
becomes the “sole motive” of the capitalist (152-53). Because the desire for surplus

value is by deﬁnition limitless, or freed from an economy of “deﬁnite wants,” capitalism

33

creates an economic process that follows a logic similar to that utilized earlier by Hegel
in deﬁning the historical process and later by Lacan in deﬁning the status of the divided
subject. One might equate the “surplus” within Marx’s account of capitalism to the
excess that is ceaselessly produced by the dialectical process in Hegel, according to
which a core of irreducible otherness, the “burden” of “something alien,” perpetually
escapes incorporation into the consciousness and therefore drives the dialectic of history
as a perpetual repetition of a failure to achieve ﬁrll self-realization. (Altemately, this
failure is a failure to make oneself self-identical, or to become identical with one’s
“essence”) (Hegel 56—57). Additionally, one might note the structural similarity between
Marx’s concept of surplus and the Lacanian notion of the real as the impossible /
constitutive limit of symbolic order, as an “excess” produced by the process of
signiﬁcation that always escapes incorporation into the symbolic order. According to
Marx’s system, the notion of surplus becomes materialized under capitalism in the form
of the commodity, which therefore becomes a “fetish,” or a material embodiment of the
constitutive disruption (surplus value) that gives birth to capitalism. Similarly, the
Lacanian real takes the physical form of the objet petit a, the material embodiment of the
impossible / constitutive limit of the symbolic order. Like the commodity, the objet petit
a gives material form to an excess that forever escapes capture by the subject in the sense
that it cannot be decisively integrated into the very symbolic network to which it gives
rise. Like the desire for surplus value, the desire set in motion by the stubborn
persistence of the Lacanian real beyond the grasp of the subject is by deﬁnition limitless.
Along these lines, Slavoj Ziiek has argued that “Marxian surplus value announces

effectively the logic of the Lacanian objet petit a” (Sublime Object 50).

34

Signiﬁcant to my analysis is the fact that in addition to the commodity, the ﬁgure
of the factory machine serves to embody the seemingly immaterial process of capitalist
exchange. In his exposition of the machine as an embodiment of capital, Marx gives us
an early and superb expression of what Mark Seltzer describes as “the double logic of
technology as prosthesis,” according to which the machine can serve either as a prosthetic
extension of human agency, or as a thing which robs people of agency, an external object
onto which human agency is uneasily displaced (Seltzer 10). Marx distinguishes between
the “tool” and the “machine” along these lines. According to Marx’s analysis, a tool
represents an extension of human agency and forms the basis of an “organic” engagement
between human will and nature, while the machine, as “the material embodiment of
capital,” reverses this relationship, subjugating the human agent to the laws of an
assumed natural order, as codiﬁed in the dogma of free market economics (Marx 427).
Within this formulation of the machine as “the material embodiment of capital,” Marx
sees a manifestation of the perverse and unquenchable desire created by the divorce of
exchange value from use value, in which the supremacy of exchange value puts an end to
the ﬁnite economy of desire presumed to exist in pro-capitalist societies. In “the form of
machinery, the implements of labor become automatic, things moving and working
independent of the workman,” and the workman himself becomes a piece in an industrial
perpetual motion machine (403)., This displacement of agency onto the machines of
production occurs in “every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is... a process of
creating surplus value.” Every such system of production “has this in common, that it is
not the workman that employs the instruments of labor, but the instruments of labor that

employ the workman” (423). The factory worker is therefore literally subj ugated to the

35

movement of the machine, which is itself an expression of the ravenous desire created by
the market economy.

The machine therefore becomes the ﬁgure of the disturbance of what is posited as
a pre-capitalist relationship between a laborer and the implements of his labor. This
displacement of agency is registered through the intermingling of the competing
metaphors of the organism and the machine. Thus, “machinery organized into a system”
becomes “a body,” while the worker who must learn to adapt his own motions to the
movement of the machine becomes “an automaton” (Marx 418, 421). We thus witness,
in Marx’s text, “the unlinking of motion and volition,” that, according Seltzer, creates “an
erotics of uncertain agency” (Seltzer 17-18).

Marx registers the uncertainty of human agency in this formulation by a re-
drawing of the boundary between the organic body of the worker and the machinic body
of the factory. At this point, it becomes more apparent how the abstract body produced in
the text of Capital is implicitly a racial body in the sense that Robert Young, adopting the
terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, describes the body produced by the Victorian
“desiring machine” as a racial body (Young 181). The worker’s body that is produced in
the factory is dismembered and remade by the impersonal ﬂows of desire created by the
capitalist economy and registered by the machines of production. It is around these
machines that the worker’s body is constantly taken apart and put back together again
according to the perverse and ever-ﬂuctuating ﬂows of desire created by (or unleashed
by) the market. Deleuze and Guattari describe this process succinctly:

The decoding of ﬂows in capitalism has freed, deterritorialized, and decoded the

ﬂows of code. . . to such a degree that the automatic machine has always

36

increasingly internalized them in its body or its structure as a ﬁeld of forces.

(Anti-Oedipus 233)
That the process of dismemberment and re-memberment (or “deterritorialization” and
“reterritorialization” in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms) embodied in the “machine”
produces a racialized body within Marx’s text becomes apparent in a couple of ways.
First, Marx describes this crisis in the relationship between laborers and their implements
in the vocabulary of racial degeneration. Another way to put this is that the trope of
progress is called into question at least in part through Marx’s rhetorical strategy of
describing it in overtly racial terms. In other words, the narrative of progress is shown to
be dependent on the vocabulary of race, and Marx’s emphasis on this racial terminology
taints the narrative with a menace that corresponds to the threat of “anomie,” or “bondage
to one’s unfocused, unbounded appetites” (Herbert 72). We might note, for instance, the
racial menace implicit in the term “fetishism,” which is used to describe “the mystical
character of commodities” within the capitalist system, according to which the inanimate
products of labor seem to be motivated by a systemic will beyond human control. The
development of capitalism is thus described as a sort of racial regression, according to
which the state of mind promoted in those who live under capitalism is equated to
fetishism, which is commonly believed, by the mid-nineteenth century, to be the most
degenerate and primitive form of anirnism practiced by West Africans.3 Capitalism
therefore menaces us with a regression into the atavistic past. This idea of regression is
made more explicit through a comparison of capitalist society to “the European middle
ages,” when “the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labor

appear, at all events, as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under

37

the shape of social relations between the products of labor.” Such a pro-capitalist
consciousness, which is set back with the development of capitalism, is known to mark
“the threshold of the history of all civilized races” (Marx 77). Marx’s rhetoric in this
passage directly indicates that capitalism, to the extent that it produces a state of
consciousness known as fetishism, has the effect of erasing the distinction between the
advanced and primitive “races.”

While Marx describes the proletariat in what are apparently deliberately racial
terms, it is abundantly clear that it would not make sense to equate the inﬁnite desire of
capitalism, which attaches itself to the bodies of laborers through their incorporation into
the factory system, with a boundless Malthusian sexual drive. Desire within Marx’s
system does not originate in individual bodies; we cannot add together each individual’s
desire and get a sum that is equal to the sum total of the desire of the system of
capitalism. With the complete severance of exchange value from use value there is also
an absolute separation of the inﬁnite, systemic desire of capitalism from the “natural,”
ﬁnite desire of individual biological drives. Marx underscores this absolute
incommensurability early in Capital, Volume One when he argues that

the exchange of commodities [in capitalism] is evidently an act characterized by a

total abstraction from use value. . .. As use values commodities are above all of

different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities and

consequently do not contain an atom of use value. (3 7-3 8)

Capitalism as a system is therefore constituted through a necessary and originary
disruption: exchange value and use value are absolutely incommensurable systems of

valuation. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the complete disconnection that Marx

38

 

articulates between use value and an economy of ﬁnite needs and exchange value and its
corresponding economy of inﬁnite desire takes place when, through the M-C-M
relationship, money, “instead of simply representing the relations of commodities,. . .
enters... into relations with itself” by differentiating “itself as original value from itself as
surplus-value” (227). As absolutely incommensurable systems of valuation, use value
and exchange value are set in relation to each other only when this incommensurability is
put into circulation around a material object that comes to manifest the central
impossibility of this relation. Thus, the commodity becomes a “fetish” because within
the capitalist system it embodies the fundamental incommensurability between two
systems of valuation. By giving a physical body to this irresolvable tension, the
commodity enables capitalism to exist as a dialectical alignment of absolutely
incommensurable logics. In materializing this constitutive disruption, however, the
commodity also conceals it, for within the commodity the products of labor “assume a
fantastic form different from their reality” GVlarx 325). Again, we might draw attention
to the parallel logic between the commodity, which materializes the constitutive
disruption of capitalism, and Lacan’s objet petit a, which gives material form to the real,
or the constitutive / impossible limit of the subject.

In order to ﬁrrther this comparison, we might note that within Capital, the logic of
subject formation is repeatedly shown to be parallel to the logic of commodity formation.
Thus,

The reproduction of a mass of labor power, which must incessantly reincorporate

itself with capital for that capital’s self-expansion; which cannot get free from

capital, and whose enslavement to capital is... concealed,. .. this reproduction of

39

labor power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction of capital itself.

Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat. (613-14)
The production of a certain kind of laborer, then, is a condition of the production of
surplus value that deﬁnes capital. We therefore witness how the interpolation of the
worker is intimately linked to the production and reproduction of the system itself: one
cannot exist without the other. Thus, the illimitable production of “surplus value”
inevitably results in the parallel production of a “surplus population” of laborers that is
distinguished by the same perverse generativity that characterizes the system, the
expression of which requires the vocabulary of race (even though “vagabonds, criminals,
and prostitutes” are excluded at the beginning of the discussion) (Marx 643). This
“army” of laborers is constantly increasing in size “according to the laws of capitalist
production” (644). The section on surplus population that dwells on the threatening
generativity of those created by the system of production, contains, interestingly, one of
Marx’s most explicit uses of the image of dismemberment, in which the “means for the
development of production. . .mutilate the laborer into a ﬁagrnent of a man, degrade him
to the level of an appendage of a machine” (644). In this way, Marx returns us, at the end
of a tale of racial regression, to the vision of the machine, expressive of an impersonal
and uncontrollable desire, dismembering and remaking the body of the laborer, and
therefore marking his ﬁagmented body with the anomie of capitalism. The “law” which
necessitates both the production of commodities and the creation of surplus bodies thus
“rivets the laborer to capital more ﬁrmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to

the rock” (645).

40

I would like to return to Heart of Darkness in order to further trace the movement
of capital through the story, and to continue the examination of the relationship between
this movement and the creation of boundaries of gender and race. Thus, we might turn
our attention to the one other point in the story at which a black body attains individual
coherence: the point at which Marlow is captivated by Kurtz’s Aﬁ'ican mistress, the “wild
and gorgeous apparition of a woman” whose body becomes the focus of a lengthy
soliloquy (55). Her body takes shape not around a machine, but around the knick-knacks,
the various spoils of empire, the savage manifestations of the wealth that she has received
from Kurtz. Every body part that appears in the lengthy description does so in relation to
the “barbarous ornaments” that adorn her body (55-56). Thus,

She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the

earth proudly, with a slight jingle and ﬂash of barbarous ornaments. She carried

her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a hehnet; she had brass leggings
to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek,
innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of
witch men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must
have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. . . . [The] immense
wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at
her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and

passionate soul. (55-56)

Much as the various body parts hovering indiscriminately on the bank of the river
congeal around the steam engine of the boat to form the savage ﬁreman as a collection of

signiﬁers of absolute difference, the body of this “savage and super ” woman coalesces

41

around the knick-knacks that are the spoils of empire, the fetishized manifestations of
capital, emerging from the “[d]ark human shapes [that] could be made out in the distance,
ﬂitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest” (56). Conrad seems to build
her black female body out of trinkets quite deliberately. Also like the savage ﬁreman,
this uncanny coalescence of features that deﬁnes the black body seems to vacillate
between attaining an independent and uniﬁed being and being reabsorbed by the
wilderness ﬁ'om which it took form. Thus the narrator ﬁrst metaphorically equates her
body to the jungle as “the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul,” and then as
the boat moves downriver she is literally reabsorbed by the “thickets,” being once again
disassembled, becoming merely a pair of “eyes [that] glearned back at us in the dusk”
before she disappears altogether (56). The signiﬁcance of this scene is not that the
indistinguishable sea of body parts precedes the coalescence of the woman’s body and
therefore indicates Marlow’s inability to distinguish one African from another; rather the
importance of this violent ambivalence toward her body, ﬁgured as vacillation between
its dismemberment and re-memberment that takes place under Marlow’s desirous gaze, is
that this ambivalence announces the approach to the real, which is manifested by the
woman’s body. She becomes an object that simultaneously attracts and repels Marlow’s
gaze, effectively dividing his desire. Yet, if her body serves as an intrusion of the real, it
also helps us connect such intrusions in Conrad’s work explicitly to the movement of
capital: her body parts are brought into being, one after the other, by the magic touch of
the fetishized objects, or commodities, of colonial trade. These objects take on their
power, we are told, because they embody the value of “elephant tusks,” the commodity

that is so fundamental to trade in the Belgian Congo that its name “rings in the air” (in

42

fact announcing the omnipresent, asignifying “roll of drums” that also hangs in the air
throughout the journey, discussed earlier), and it becomes a form of currency, the
medium of exchange, within the novel (31). This description, then, allows us not only to
state that the woman’s body becomes an objet petit a, embodying and concealing the
constitutive contradictions of a given symbolic order; additionally, we see that this
compelling and horrifying object, her body, is a by-product of capital. Her elbows, her
knees, her hair, her face, and her neck each come into being as they are touched by the
trinkets that are explicitly shown to carry the symbolic charge of the conunodity.

Also similar to the case of the savage ﬁreman, there is a distancing of the
movement of the commodity that gives birth to the woman’s body through the paradigm
of fetishism, an attitude that is once again displaced onto the African. Just as the savage
ﬁreman is in “a thrall to strange witchcraft,” worshipping the steam engine as a deity,
imbuing an inanimate object with life, so the compelling Aﬁican woman’s ornaments
become “barbarous” and foreign, “ bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch men” (56). The
overt equation of the strange power of the charms with the “fetishistic” religion of the
African “witch men” leads us to the conclusion that Conrad is quite deliberately making a
comparison between the strangely animate and willful qualities of the commodity and
fetishistic religion, generally accepted to be the most degraded and the most authentically
African form of religion in existence. We witness, in this instance, a racialization of the
Enlightenment ideal of progress, according to which the attitudes acquired by white men
under the rule of capital are equated with the degenerate religion of the Africans, and the
ideal of historical progress is therefore, as in Capital, Volume One, colored with racial

menace. This technique of juxtaposing what was assumed to be the nadir of human

43

culture with the progress supposed to be powered by the has market was a technique that
Conrad shared not only with Marx but a wide variety of writers during the second half of
the nineteenth century, ranging from Matthew Arnold to H. G. Wells. W. J. T. Mitchell
has summarized this practice, exempliﬁed in a phrase such as “commodity fetishism,” as
“a kind of catachresis, a violent yoking of the most primitive, exotic, irrational, degraded
objects of human value with the most modern, ordinary, rational, and civilized” (191).
As does Marx, Conrad juxtaposes capitalism with primitive religion, and “in calling
commodities fetishes, is telling the nineteenth-century reader that the material basis of
modern, civilized, rational political economy is structurally equivalent to that which is
most inirnical to modern consciousness” (Mitchell 191). In the scene in which the
African woman’s body is constructed through the touch of the commodity in Heart of
Darkness, we witness a similar catachresis according to which the fetish objects of
capitalism which bring the woman’s body into being through their magic touch are
simultaneously described as the fetish objects of primitive religion. Thus, they get their
power not only ﬁom the “value of... elephant tusks” that they contain (the fetish of
European imperialism), but also from the “witch men,” for whom they are “charms”
(Conrad 56).

In addition to collapsing modern and primitive values, however, this technique
puts distance between the modern and primitive values that it temporarily equates. Such
distance is apparent to the degree that the intimate physical relationship of the primitive
Aﬁican woman with the fetish objects that interpellate her body separates her absolutely
from the cultured European woman who is her counterpart. As we ﬁnish tracing the

movement of the commodity through Heart of Darkness by examining Marlow’s

encounter with “the intended,” Kurtz’s bereft ﬁancé in Belgium, the signiﬁcance of the
ultimate difference provided by this temporary collapse of the modern commodity and
the primitive religious fetish will become apparent.

Analogous to the equation of commodity and fetish in the scene describing the
body of the Aﬁican woman is the parallel drawn by Conrad immediately upon our
introduction to “the intended.” While the ornaments worn by Kurtz’s Aﬁican mistress
are said to contain the “value of several elephant tusks,” “the intended” is located in a
sumptuously attired room (56). In this room of marble and mahogany, Marlow’s
attention falls on a grand piano that resembles “a somber and polished sarcophagus” (68).
The ivory of the piano keys goes unmentioned, but the correspondence between the
ornamental piano as the centerpiece of the “lofty drawing room” and the “barbarous
ornaments” adorning the body of the black woman is nevertheless explicit (68; 55-56).
The comparison between the two encounters, marked at the beginning by the piano with
its reference to ivory, is underscored at the end of the meeting with “the intended” by an
explicit comparison between the gesture of sorrow made by each of them upon losing
Kurtz.

The similarity between the “barbarous ornaments” and the “grand piano”
decisively marks racial and gender boundaries according to a set of relationships
established by the commodity. The piano represents the aesthetic realm with its
assumed transcendence of the crass materiality of actual economic relations, yet the
veiled relationship of the two supposedly separate spheres of experience is emphasized
by the unspoken connection of the ivory keys with the monstruous exploitation of

Belgian’s Aﬁican colony, the main activity of the quasi-govemmental “company” and its

45

star agent, Kurtz, being the collection of ivory. If we recall that Marlow tells us the
“word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed” upon his arrival in Africa (an
observation that he frequently repeats), his failure to speak the word in this scene, despite
his focus on the piano, foreshadows his inability to speak Kurtz’s actual last words to
“the intended” despite his apparent desire to do so (20). In this scene Marlow has
encountered the absent line between a civilization deﬁned by covert relationships
between high culture and economic exploitation and a primitive society where this
relationship is supposed to appear more direct or obvious. Marlow, of course, continually
undermines this distinction through his constant activity of comparison and
demystiﬁcation, although this activity apparently tortures him; it is as though he cannot
resist picking at a wound. This difference that constantly gives impetus to the ever-
renewed revelation of uncanny similarity remains unspeakable throughout the novel,
except in terms of negation. We might recall, for instance, Marlow’s inability to name
Aﬁicans as human, having to settle instead for the horrifying “suspicion of their not
being inhuman” (32). We might say, then, that his confrontation with this unspeakable
thing culminates in his encounter with “the intended.” This title, we might note, becomes
a sort of “rigid designator” in the course of the text, indicating an essence that cannot be
equated to any quality or set of qualities, or a name that refers “rigidly and regardless of
its descriptive features” (Butler, Bodies That Matter 212). As such, “the intended” comes
to stand for the essence of “civilization” not due to a set of qualities or characteristics that
can be named; rather, she comes to stand for an essence because she marks a set of
relationships that cannot be avowed; she stands for an essence because she locates the site

of a failure of enunciation.

46

At this point, I would like to clarify Marlow’s inability to speak in the ﬁnal scene
of Heart of Darkness. In order to do so, we must ﬁrst observe the emphasis throughout
the story on a particular type of asigniﬁcation that is presented through a series of aural
and visual cues, cues that disrupt meaning yet promise a more sensually immediate
experience than meaning can offer. This inscrutability that is simultaneously a promise
of a more direct or unmediated encounter with reality than language can ordinarily
provide seems to be a property attached to Aﬁican landscapes, bodies, and language.
Marlow’s inability to speak certain words in his encounter with “the intended” indicates a
desire to prolong the ambivalent attractions of this perpetually missed encounter with
Africa. The words that cannot be spoken in this scene are the words that connect the
production of commodities to the construction of race. It seems that to utter these words
would bring the constitutive split of the white, civilized subject too close to awareness,
and as a result Marlow recoils from them. Kurtz’s ﬁnal pronormcement, “The horror!
The horror!” cannot be spoken to “the intended” not only because it would deﬁle a pure
mind, antiseptically quarantined from the cruel realities of colonialism in the Belgian
Congo. More fundamentally, Marlow’s performative failure is induced because to speak
these words in her presence would be to bring a series of connections, the disavowal of
which form the core of the white subject, too close to consciousness. The evidence of
this process abounds in Heart of Darkness, be it in the form of reiterated encounters with
inscrutable, mask-like African faces or in Marlow’s ﬁnal performative failure. We might
note, for instance, Marlow’s explanation of Kurtz’s ﬁnal words: they “had the appalling
face of a glimpsed truth — the strange commingling of desire and hate” (65). This

explanation, in which the approach toward the “face” of the “truth” is made to seem like

47

a ﬁnal encounter with the inscrutable African faces that conﬁont Marlow throughout the
story, might be read as announcing the approach of the real. The strange, Poe-like quality
of horror attached to ordinary objects in the ﬁnal scene, as when the piano becomes “a
somber and polished sarcophagus,” supports this reading (68). The fact that Marlow
views the piano, the site of his ﬁrst failure of enunciation in the concluding scene, as a
coffm, underscores the fact that his performative failure not only enacts the formation of
his own civilized subjectivity, but also forms the unavowable limit of such a subjectivity.
The piano lingers in the scene as the materialization of this limit, this constitutive failure,
which Marlow experiences as the threat of death for his civilized subjectivity.

Within the text, we consistently encounter a certain way of perceiving human
differences. Within this mode of perception, there seems to be both the threat that
ﬁrndamental distinctions will collapse (for instance, between the Aﬁican fetishist and the
European commodity fetishist), and a certain fascination with this seemingly immanent
collapse. It is no coincidence that Heart of Darkness is a book riven with uncanny
resemblances across a racial divide. “Civilization” itself, and the colonial civilizing
process that is central to it, seems to be at risk with this perpetually impending collapse of
racial and cultural boundaries. We might therefore understand Marlow’s failure of
enunciation in terms of what Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks has referred to as “performative
failure. . . fraught with racial anxiety,” indicative of “the constitutive split within
whiteness” (366). Within this reading, “whiteness” would be understood as the
constitutive lack within the subject that resists signiﬁcation and therefore gives rise to the
repetitive attempt to directly encounter that which by deﬁnition eludes such an encounter.

Marlow’s perpetually failing attempt to achieve perfect communion through a sensual

48

immediacy that bypasses the mediation of meaning might be seen as a symptom of such a
missed encounter, as this quest for perfect communion is both provoked and disrupted by
a racial presence (or, more accurately, an absence that is named “race” and manifested as
the inscrutable, racialized body). In other words, racial difference is the condition of this
quest, but it is a condition that simultaneously guarantees its failure. Alternately, we
might state that racial difference exists within the text of Heart of Darkness as a
constitutive trauma through which Marlow is created as a subject. The structural center
of trauma, or the lack that forms the subject, might, in this case, be given the name of
“race.” Race then becomes the unspeakable something that cannot be assimilated into the
symbolic narrative of civilization and that simultaneously marks its “apparently
accidental origin” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 55).

In the ﬁnal scene of Heart of Darkness, the objet petit a, the object that manifests
the central contradictions of the constitution of the subject through a structural lack,
would seem to be the ivory piano keys. For my argument, it is crucial that ivory
simultaneously denotes both the difference of race and the movement of capital
throughout the novel. The encounter with ivory is unspeakable for Marlow because it is
an encounter with the real and can therefore never be spoken or symbolically digested.
More speciﬁcally, in the ﬁnal scene ivory comes to represent “the racial thing” upon
which the entire distinction between civilization and primitive society ﬁnally depends.
Thus, Marlow’s performative failure in the ﬁnal scene of the story is indicative of an
encounter with the real that is manifested as a racial objet a: ivory is the substance that
both creates the distinction between civilized and primitive society (in the form of the

\

ﬁance' / mistress) and collapses this difference (in the form of the commodity / fetish).

49

Slavoj Zizek writes that the
Real is the unfathomable remainder of the ethnic substance whose predicates are
different cultural features that constitute our identity. In this precise sense, race
relates to culture as the Real does to the symbolic. “Real ” is the unfathomable X
that is at stake in our cultural struggles. . .. [T]here must be some X that is I
“expressed” in the cultural set of values, attitudes, rituals, etc., that materialize our
way of life. [This X]... is always the objet petit a, the little piece of the Real.
[italics mine] (“Love Thy Neighbor” 169)
We might understand the problem posed by ivory and a number of otherwise innocuous
objects in the course of Heart of Darkness in terms of the relationship between “culture”
and “race” that is suggested by Ziiek in this passage. In the ﬁnal passage of Heart of
Darkness, the entire realm of European culture, so uneasily synonymous with
“civilization” throughout the story, seems to be salvaged by Marlow’s refusal either to
name “ivory” as the substance deﬁnitive of the sumptuous drawing room or to speak
Kurtz’s last words. We see, in this instance, race as the traumatic kernel of the real that
gives rise to the realm of culture or civilization through its very absence or unreality.
Signiﬁcant for this argument is the manner in which ivory delineates race and
gender boundaries in the novel. We rrright note, for instance, the way that ivory, the
carrier of the impetus of capital, creates the body of the African woman through contact,
imbuing the parts of her body with life as it touches them. Thus the movement of her
body, her head, her hair, her neck, are singled out and come alive as they are touched by
the “jingle and ﬂash of barbarous ornaments,” which are given signiﬁcance through the

realization that they have become vessels carrying “the value of several elephant tusks”

50

(56). Ivory, by the means of the metonymic magic of contact, creates the black female
body as a fearful object, as the emanation of the “colossal body of the fecund and
mysterious life” of the African wilderness (56). In contrast to the deep embodiment of
the African woman through intimate contact with ornaments that are the manifestations
of capital, we have the impossible detached transcendence of the European woman.
Through the room that is thickly invested with the magic of capital, she approaches
Marlow without touching the physical world that might infect her with the type of
physicality that makes the African woman so disturbing and compelling. Thus, Marlow
relates how “she came ﬂoating towards me in the dusk. This fair hair, this pale visage,
this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out
at me” [italics mine] (68-69). Marlow is unable to speak the ﬁnal words of Kurtz for the
same reason that he is unable to speak the word “ivory” in her presence. To do so would
be to touch her with the taint of capital, and to bring her down to earth from “that great
and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness” (70). It is through
Marlow’s lie that he preserves her transcendence, and yet to tell the lie is also to endorse
the order of exploitation that both takes its inspiration from and supports the lie. Another
way to explain Marlow’s conundrum: if he did not tell the lie, he would put an end to the
process of displacement and disavowal through which the black body is interpellated
through its intimate connection with the commodity. In this case, not to tell the lie would
be to embody the pale goddess, to deﬁle her of “the unextinguishable light of belief and
love” and to consign her to “the triumphant darkness ﬁom which I could not have
defended her” (69-70). Although he feels the “dusk... repeating them in a persistent

whisper all around us,” Marlow is unable to utter Kurtz’s last words, replacing these

51

words, signiﬁcantly, with the white woman’s name (although this name is also omitted
from the text, replaced with the rigid designator “the intended”) (71). This woman,
whose features and gestures make her an “eloquent phantom,” and whose eloquence
might be contrasted to the African woman, “a tragic and familiar shade, bedecked with
powerless charms,” is preserved ﬁom the same fate as the African woman through
Marlow’s performative failure [italics mine] (71). The difference between eloquence and
powerlessness is thus conserved through Marlow’s failure to speak, as is the privileged
relation between the white woman and the European aesthetic sphere, and capital. In
both cases, the transcendent, civilized qualities that distinguish them ﬁom their primitive
counterparts threaten to collapse if the wrong word is spoken. In the end, Marlow’s
silence preserves the absolute difference between the barbarity of the African ornaments
(the representatives of something like a primitive aesthetic sphere) and the transcendence
of the European aesthetic sphere, represented by the piano, the presence of which not
only serves to draw a direct comparison between the two encounters, but which also
enforces Marlow’s silence, his inability to speak the word that would articulate its
connection with the African ornaments. We might conclude that the silence that
preserves the difference between the civilized and the primitive arts (a difference that
would seem parallel to the distinction between civilized and justiﬁable “sublimation” and
primitive or hysteric “repression” that Freud would draw thirteen years later in Totem and
Taboo) is intimately connected within the text to the silence that separates the white
woman from her African “Shade,” as the two are explicitly drawn in parallel to one

another in the ﬁnal scene of the story. Based on this reading, the connection between the

52

two women might be given the name of capital, and the psychic process that
simultaneously preserves and veils this connection might be given the name of race.
Race, in this case, is the name of the “signiﬁer [that] is the ﬁrst mark of the
subject”; the asignifying signiﬁer that stands for a constitutive absence; the signiﬁer that
takes the place of an unsigniﬁable, primary difference that is both concealed and
revealed, displaced and disavowed through signiﬁcation (Lacan, Four Fundamental
Concepts 62). As such, race might take the auditory form of a strange, unfathomable
noise hanging indeterrninately over the landscape, an asignifying origin of language.
Thus, the omnipresent Aﬁican “roll of drums” that accompanies Marlow on his journey
into the “heart of darkness” is an auditory manifestation of race to the extent that it both
conceals and reveals, simultaneously disrupts and enables, the achievement of perfect
belonging to a (racial) community (31). Altemately, race might take the visual form of a
face that has the psychic impact of a mask, a collection of features unable to convey
anything other than an absolute impenetrability. Wait’s “inscrutable” and “repulsive
mask,” which stands in for a primary and ultimately unsymbolizable difference (recall,
once again, that “a nigger does not show”), is a visible manifestation of race (12-13).
Ivory, in this story, has a particularly important role in constructing the black and
the white subject in relation to one another, because it serves as the guardian of the host
of ﬁ'agile distinctions on which the colonial project depends, and, as such, the role of
ivory must be understood to overlap with that of the fetishized machine. The “word
‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed,” and yet becomes unnamable when

Marlow is confronted with explaining Kurtz’s fate (20). Again, we are confronted by a

53

pattern of fascination and horror marked by a disruptive asigniﬁcation, indicative of a
confrontation with the objet a. Lacan writes that

the interest the subject takes in his own split is bound up with that which

determines it - namely, a privileged object, which has emerged ﬁ'om some primal

separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the Real,

whose name, in our algebra, is the objet a. (Four Fundamental Concepts 83)

The objet a, the physical manifestation of the traumatic kernel of jouissance that
constitutes the subject around an originary division from itself, emerges in Conrad’s
novel in various forms, perhaps the most important of which, from a narrative standpoint,
turns out to be ivory. Ivory comes both to conceal and reveal the movement of
commodities through the African “wildemess,” just as it traces Marlow’s perpetually
failed encounter with Africa that can never be spoken. Ivory ultimately might be
understood to represent “whiteness” metaphorically (due to its color, equivalent in the
ﬁnal scene to the “pale visage” of the intended) as well as metonymically (according to
which it traces the deterritorializing movement of capital), and it is perhaps this
correspondence that allows it to achieve its symbolic charge in the novel.

In the course of Heart of Darlaress, then, we witness the movement of the
commodity inscribing the signs of difference on black bodies, and in the same movement
delineating the intimately co-dependent boundaries of race and gender. The proper
(white) differentiation between the sexes is maintained by protecting women from the
magic touch of the fetishized commodity. This protective distance allows women to
maintain a seemingly unearthly transcendence so that the unfortunate reality of cruel

economic exploitation might be transformed into an inspiring substance, “the

54

unextinguishable light of belief and love” (69). I think that this transformation might be
appropriately termed “sublimation” due to the apparently deliberate parallelism in the
story between the domestic and aesthetic spheres. This sublime separation of the
domestic sphere, delineating the proper area of action for women, can only be maintained
by a religious silence regarding the economic relations established by capital. To utter a
word revealing this connection would be to bring the white woman into direct contact
with the piano that adorns her drawing room, to reduce the piano to the level of the
“powerless charms” worn by the Aﬁican woman, and ﬁnally to reduce the intended to the
level of her African counterpart, making her an intensely physical presence in intimate
contact with the material reality of the society that supports her existence. It would be, in
essence, to obliterate the very being of the woman and the aesthetic sphere, both of which
are internally dependent on the constitutive split within the subject of capitalism, a split
that is displaced onto racialized bodies and disavowed as racial difference. Neither the
feminine nor aesthetic sphere could exist apart from their abject African counterparts, for
both exist only as sublirnations that insure that this constitutive racial difference will be

recycled.

55

Fantasies of Race, Part II: The Limits of Conrad’s Fantasy of Racial Community

In A Singular Modernity, Fredric Jameson argues that the dialectic “can be
deﬁned as a conceptual coordination of incommensurabilities” (64). Within “the
dialectic the universal is a conceptual construction that can never know any empirical
embodiment or realization” because “the function of the universal in analysis is not to
reduce... all [particulars] to identity but rather to allow each to be perceived in its
historical difference” (182-83). Jameson therefore presents the failure of identity
between diverse elements to be the pre-condition or the inaugural point of the dialectic,
rather than the point at which it breaks down. The dialectic itself might be understood as
a methodology through which incommensurable realities or logics are aligned without
being reduced to sameness or identity. In contrast to this presentation of dialectics we
might set any number of poststructuralist “interventions” into the dialectical method. We
ﬁnd one such intercession in Modemity at Sea, in which Caesar Casarino
characteristically presents dialectics as “function[ing] according to an either / or”
binarism and a simple evolutionary logic, according to which “each successive element. . .
retroactively obliterate[s] the preceding one” (35). Thus, Casarino argues that while
Marx employs a dialectical model in order to engage “the logic of exchange,” his true
interest is to conceptualize a “nonrepresentational, asignifying, asubj ective,
incommensurable something” that will defy the violence of dialectical incorporation into
the obliterating stream of history, and thus open the door “to as yet unimaginable
historical possibilities” (95).

This debate within contemporary literary theory seems to take place on at least

two levels at once. We witness one level of the debate in Casarino’s reduction of

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dialectical logic to the “logic of exchange.” Dialectics is thus equated with the
oppressive systemic logic of capital. In defense of the dialectical method, Jameson levels
similar charges against his poststructuralist adversaries, as when he argues that the
postmodernist and poststructuralist trope of a “perpetual present,” or the moment outside
historical time that eludes incorporation into it, cannot fail to “replicate one of the most
fundamental rhythms of capitalism, namely its reduction to the present, rather than
constituting a critique of it” (Singular Modernity 194). Thus, the debate seems to derive
much of its heat ﬁom the question of whether liberation from the oppressive and
totalizing logic of exchange is available through a dialectical methodology or a
poststructuralist repudiation of such a methodology. On another level, the debate seems
to hinge on the question of whether the elusive point of asigniﬁcation or the alignment of
“incommensurabilities” should properly be understood as the inaugural point of the
dialectic or the point of its failure, the point at which the “incommensurable something”
exceeds its power of accommodation. Particularly because this debate consistently
revolves around questions of “modernity” or “modernism” (note the presence of the term
“modernity” in both Jameson’s and Casarino’s title), it seems to present an interesting
and important problem to literary scholars of modernism.

In this chapter, I will attempt to utilize some of the different possibilities that are
suggested within this discussion in order to explore concerns presented in the work of
Joseph Conrad, a pivotal ﬁgure in both Jameson’s and Casarino’s analyses of modernism.
In contrast to the oversimpliﬁed view that the dialectical method operates according to a
simple binarism and prescribes an evolutionary development, I will adopt an

interpretation of dialectical thought that posits its own failure as its fundamental

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condition of operation, and that asserts that dialectical logic is not fundamentally
evolutionary. My goal is to utilize a non-teleological dialectical method in order to
incorporate insights ﬁ'om both dialectical and poststructural criticism for an examination
of Conrad’s anxiety regarding the conditions of both community and communication. I
will therefore apply the rhizomic logic of schizophrenic addition employed by Casarino
and others in recent scholarship on Conrad as well as appeal to psychoanalytic insights
regarding the constitutive split of the subject that I employed in the previous chapter. I
believe that both are required in order to fully explore Conrad’s interest in the asignifying
aspects of language that mark him as a proto-modemist, and to explain the importance of
the black body and voice as sites where an asignifying and irreducible jouissance ﬁnds a
locus of control that is necessary for his construction of the “modern,” white subject.

By framing my examination of Conrad’s writing in these terms, I believe that I
am able to effectively intercede in the recurring critical inquiry into Conrad’s racism, and
to perform a necessary redeﬁnition of the form that such an inquiry should take. By
examining the role that the black body takes as the constitutive exclusion that establishes
the condition of possibility of Conrad’s ideal communities of sailors, this investigation
will ﬁ'ee itself from the critical dead end of merely asking whether or not Conrad was
racist in the sense that he believed in the racist stereotypes of his contemporaries and
utilized them in his writing. While the answer to this question is obviously “yes,” (I think
that Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Aﬁica” made this case convincingly in a way that
has never been refuted”) the way the question is ﬁamed seems to suggest that racism
within the context of colonialism is merely a matter of personal choice, rather than a

fundamental mechanism according to which the colonial order is both conceptualized and

58

made operative.5 I will argue that within Conrad’s writing, “race” must be understood as
a cause / effect of the colonial symbolic order rather than a matter of either cultural or
biological difference. By redeﬁning the meaning of race in symbolic terms, we are able
to free the question of Conrad’s racism from a behaviorist context that trivializes the
matter and limits the signiﬁcance of race from the beginning.6 In a broader context, I
hope that this essay suggests a more productive way of conceptualizing race generally, by
liberating it ﬁom the aporia that is the logical dead end of the question of whether race or
designates a cultural or biological entity (one can presumably assert that “culture” is a
product of human biology just as easily as one can point out that all conceptions of
“biology” are, from the beginning, cultural). Either option, of course, in a contemporary
American context, as well as in the British colonial context of Conrad, implies inferiority
— that is, our options are limited from the beginning to ﬁnding blacks either culturally,
and thus redeemably, or biologically, and thus irredeemably, inferior. We therefore have
an obligation to radically redeﬁne our thinking about race in a way that frees it from the
ﬁrndamentally racist premises of the culture / biology debate. The answer to the question
of whether racial difference is a matter of culture or biology therefore must be that it is
neither, for the question itself is horribly misguided. Racial difference cannot be
understood from the standpoint of assuming either preconstituted and self-contained
cultures or biological groups. Rather, “race,” as an empty placeholder of the real within a
European colonial symbolic order, designates a purely symbolic form of difference.

In order to ﬁnd a beginning for the project of examining the speciﬁc meaning of
race within Conrad’s writing, we will return to The Nigger of the Narcissus. In the last

chapter I argued that the voice and body of “the nigger,” the only black crewmember on

59

the ship, becomes the placeholder of the real within Conrad’s ideal community of sailors,
or “brotherhood of the sea”: Wait’s body becomes the material object that embodies and
conceals the central structural lack that is the condition of both communication and
community (N. N. 21). The view that Wait’s fetishized body represents both the
condition and the impossibility of an immaculate communion around which Conrad
constructs the ideal totality of an imaginary community is underscored by the author
himself in the preface to the American edition of the novel. Regarding Wait, Conrad
writes that “in the book he is nothing; he is merely the center of the ship’s collective
psychology and the pivot of the action. . . the book [is] written round him” (xiv). In this
passage, Conrad seems to assert that Wait’s role is both contradictory and necessary. As
the strangely absent inaugural point of the “ship’s collective psychology,” Wait is
“nothing,” but he is simultaneously the center of the action and the absent center of the
ideal community of sailors. Conrad’s emotionally ambivalent description of Wait further
reinforces his role as a central fetish around which the ship’s community revolves.
Within the preface, Wait is ﬁrst described as “an imposter of some character... scomful
of our sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions” (xiv). Yet despite Wait’s
triumphant scorn, which inspires both fear and disdain, “in the family circle and amongst
my friends” Wait, who “is familiarly referred to as The Nigger, remains very precious to
me” (xiv). This “very precious” object that inspires both fear and affection emerges as
the constitutive exclusion around which Conrad’s community forms, even in these very
short passages. He is ﬁrst opposed to the “us” in the construction “mastering our
compassion, scomful of our sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions” [italics

mine]; his function, within this sentence, is that of the abject, excluded object, inspiring

60

fear and ambivalence, around which the group of “chums” coheres (xiv). Moreover, the
repetition of the word “our” in this passage would seem to represent an attempt to shore
up this community against the outsider through sheer repetition. Instead, this repetition
emphasizes the fact that the community attains its imaginary consistency only as a
reaction to the traumatic, antagonistic kernel that is Wait’s body. In other words, the
repeated failure of the community of the ship to seal itself off hermetically against Wait,
its constitutive exclusion, demonstrates his necessity to its social fabric. A few lines
later, when Conrad refers to the “circle” of his “family” and “friends,” Wait is similarly a
“very precious” but obviously excluded and absent object. He is, in Conrad’s own
words, the “nothing” around which both of these communities adhere. We might say that
Wait is the “exiled, foreclosed uncertainty which haunts the system and generates the
illusion” of its unity and coherence (Baudrillard 6).

Wait’s voice represents the presence of an elusive jouissance that evades
incorporation into the ideal community and preserves all of its disruptive power amidst
the system that desperately wishes itself closed off against any possibility of disruption.
Wait’s booming, metallic cough, echoing through the ship as a reminder of the illusory
nature of the perfect communion that always seems just out of reach when one is in the
presence of blacks, is an episode that ﬁnds many analogues within Conrad’s writing.
Conrad’s fascination with the asignifying aspects of language is, almost without
exception, accompanied by the proximity of racialized bodies: there is, for instance, the
omnipresent drumming that hangs in the air over Marlow’s journey to the center of the
“dark continent” in Heart of Darkness. This drumming provides a backdrop of

suggestive asignifying noise similar to the disruptive presence of Wait’s cough ringing

61

through the Narcissus; it hovers over the landscape, simultaneously promising and
withholding perfect communion, and culminates only when it becomes localized in
particular African voices as the “strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of
human language” (62). We might note that such drumming accompanies Aﬁica
elsewhere in Conrad’s writing, that it seems even to be the mysterious element that
deﬁnes Aﬁica. Thus, in “An Outpost of Progress,” the white protagonists Kayerts and
Carlier seem unable to escape this strangely suggestive sound:
All night they were disturbed by a lot of drumming in the villages... [It] would
spread out over the forest, roll through the night, unbroken and ceaseless, near and
far, as if the whole land had been one immense drum booming out steadily an
appeal to heaven. And through the deep and tremendous noise sudden yells that
resembled snatches of songs from a madhouse darted shrill and high in discordant
jets of sound. (47])
In this scene, sound piles on top of sound until it becomes all-pervasive, intensifying until
it saturates the landscape. Following a logic of sheer accumulation, this layering of
sound upon sound inundates the entire body of the land. The “deep, rapid roll near by
would be followed by another far off,” then “short appeals would rattle out here and
there,” until all would “mingle together, increase, become vigorous and sustained” (471).
This vast and pervasive sound of drumming and shouting, as it is perceived by Kayerts
and Carlier, accumulates according to a rhizonric logic of “ﬁts and starts.” “[D]iscordant
jets of sound” made up of “sudden yells” cannot be reduced to a logical pattern; instead,
they dart through the air “shrill and high” as in a “madhouse,” absolutely resisting

relegation to a pattern that can be integrated into the logic of primitivism (in other words

62

civilization) by Kayerts or Carlier (471). In this context, we might note that this
progressive accretion of noise traces what Deleuze and Guattari would describe as a “line
of escape” from meaning, because the noise both begins and ends outside of the realm of
signiﬁcation, traveling, as it does, ﬁ'om the “madhouse” to “heaven.” Instead of being
reduced to a logic of primitivism or comfortably domesticated within the symbolic
conﬁnes of the asylum, this immense sound impresses itself upon the entire mass of land,
which in turn becomes “one immense drum,” saturated with and eﬁusive of an excessive
sound composed of “rhizomatic ruptures and deviations” (Casarino 79). Here we witness
the African drumming as “a pure and intense sonorous material that is always connected
to its own abolition — a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signiﬁcation...
a sonority that ruptures in order to break away from a chain that is still all too signifying”
(Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 6). This remarkable, asignifying noise intensiﬁes until the
entire landscape becomes “a saturating body,” terrifying in its de-contextualized and
irreducible presence, “that breaks the symbolic structure” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka
7). The material body of Aﬁica is constructed in this scene as a gigantic asignifying
mass, exceeding the poor domesticating strategies of colonial trade to an alarming extent.

It is this Aﬁica, the Aﬁica that is an asignifying mass of ﬁightening proportions
in the midst of the domesticated map of colonial trade, which attracts Marlow in the
opening pages of Heart of Darkness. Marlow’s initial explanation of his attraction to
Aﬁica focuses on “the blank spaces” of the map, and within “the biggest, the most
blank,” by which he designates the African Congo, there was

One river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map,

resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest

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curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. . . it

fascinated me as a snake would a bird... the snake had charmed me. (5-6)
When Marlow receives his commission as riverboat captain in the Belgian Congo, he
comments that “I was going into the yellow [uncharted territory]. Dead in the center.
And the river was there — fascinating — deadly—like a snake” (7). In these passages, the
Congo River entices the protagonist like the snake in the Garden of Eden, fascinating
Marlow with the promise of knowledge. While in some sense the meandering river into
the center of the unknown region traces a “line of escape” into areas that have remained
“blank” and therefore have resisted the progressive commodiﬁcation of the globe that
dictates the oppressive logic of empire, the reference seems too encumbered with dread to
suggest the possibility of liberation. Rather, the image of the snake swallowing Marlow
like a bird suggests that he will be claustrophobically engulfed and absorbed within the
very logic he seeks to escape. The enticement of the yellow area is not that of a simple
return to an edenic pure being in the moment, or a mythical, pre-lapsarian being which
cannot be reduced to meaning.7 The reference to the fall instead seems to suggest an
intimate knowledge of alienation. In this case, alienation is not the experience of being
exiled from the presence of God, but rather a permanent exile from oneself, a granting of
the painful awareness that one can never be fully oneself that marks the mythical moment
of the inauguration of both history and meaning.

Aﬁica, to the extent that it is understood in terms of an irreducible jouissance as
in the passages above, cannot be “represented,” in the strict sense of the term, on
Marlow’s map. It exists on the map only as a blank space that cannot be made to signify.

It is a sustaining internal limit to the colonial symbolic order which can become manifest

64

only in the form of a reality laying stubbornly and persistently outside of the symbolic
order. As such, Africa not only sustains this order as its abject, excluded other, but
additionally threatens to destroy it. The promise that draws Marlow irresistibly into the
heart of darkness is therefore something entirely different from an escape ﬁ'om an
oppressive civilization into some form of pure freedom or uninhibited being. What draws
Marlow to Africa is a fascination with this yellow space on the map that marks both an
absence and an excess of signification, with this thing that exists as an irreducible
otherness at the very core of the colonial civilization that is represented by the map of the
world. Marlow succumbs to the erotic allure of this indeﬁnable something that sustains
his symbolic existence.

As in “An Outpost of Progress,” in Heart of Darkness Aﬁica comes to be deﬁned
by a rhizomic logic of addition that overwhelms the evolutionary and reductive logic of
civilization. It is in this sense that we must understand Marlow’s introduction to the
continent, during which he witnesses a French warship ﬁring in apparently random
fashion toward the land. Conrad writes that

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible,

ﬁring into a continent. Pop would go one of the six-inch guns; a small ﬂame

would dart and vanish, a little whit smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile
would give a feeble screech - and nothing happened Nothing could happen.

There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in

the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly

there was a camp of natives — he called them enemies! — hidden out of sight

somewhere. [italics mine] (1 l)

65

In this scene, the ludicrous impotence of the French man-of-war begins with its inability
to make any discernible mark on the sheer enormity of the landmass of Aﬁica. The
“insanity” of the proceeding, however, far exceeds the physical mismatch between the
diminutive cannons ﬁring “tiny projectile[s]” and the physical immensity of “a
continent.” The very fact that the strip of land that is the target of the shelling is
indistinguishable from the entire continent of Aﬁica indicates that the problem that is
faced by the man-of-war, as by Marlow himself, is a problem of meaning rather than one
of military incapacity. The very act of naming and categorizing a piece of this irreducible
mass as human “enemies” strikes Marlow as inherently absurd, an observation that
underscores the fact that within this scene Aﬁica cannot be differentiated ﬁ'om itself (and
there fore set in relation to itself) any more than it can be exchanged as a whole within the
colonial system of signiﬁcation. Regardless of the holocausts marking the movement of
rn'ﬁ'rtary and commercial “progress” across the continent (the ability of European capital
to create devastation and genocide is amply documented within Heart of Darkness),
Aﬁica still forms a point at which meaning fails. This failure is not just incidental —
“nothing happened” — but inevitable and seemingly absolute — “nothing could happen.”
Yet within Conrad’s writing, this very irreducibility typically marks the beginning, rather
than the end, of a dialectical process: that which eludes deﬁnition, that which cannot be
reduced to or exchanged for meaning, characteristically becomes a beginning point of the
symbolic order.
While this incommensurable something cannot be divided or exchanged, cannot
be set in relation to itself or anything else, it can be materialized. In the three scenes

described above, the landmass of Aﬁica itself materializes this something which is

66

nothing, this nothing around which a symbolic order can take shape, as the “collective
psychology” of the Narcissus takes shape around the “nothing” that is James Wait, or,
more speciﬁcally, the nothing that Wait materializes (N. N. xiv). In Lacanian terms, this
unsigrriﬁable kernel of jouissance is designated as the “real” and the object that
materializes this void within the symbolic order is the objet petit a. This material void,
this irreducible something, is the very condition of the dialectic of identity. It is around
this primary exclusion, this asignifying object, that both the subject and the community
take shape, and it is this object that inaugurates desire. We might note, then, that
Marlow’s desire to immerse himself in the yellow area of the map and thereby force it to
reveal its secret is largely an effort to incorporate this indefmable something into the
colonial symbolic order represented by the map, or to force the objet a to signify. To do
so, however, would be the death of the colonial, white subject, which is built around the
void of an asignifying blackness. In support of this interpretation, we might note that
Marlow’s preservation of this order of being can take place only through silence and
evasion, for having “peeped over the edge,” or encountered the limitation of the white
subject in his experience in the Belgian Congo, he nevertheless lies about his discovery to
the Intended at the conclusion of the story in order to preserve “that great and saving
illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness” [italics mine] (65; 70). In this
instance, Marlow has come to the realization that the illusion of civilization as a
meaningful entity can only be preserved by a silence that conceals a set of relationships
the revelation of which would be symbolic death.8 Marlow’s confrontation with the real
in Heart of Darkness is marked by silence and evasion, culminating in “the lie” to the

Intended which marks the end of the story, and we observe a similar instance when. the

67

crew of the Narcissus mutinies over a vague and inarticulate dissatisfaction that somehow
centers on the person of James Wait. When asked what they want by the captain, the
entire crew is struck dumb. Signiﬁcantly, Conrad depicts this silence in terms of an
imaginary confrontation with an obscenely grinning Wait, “chuckling painfully over his
transparent deceptions” (98). As the crew engages in this imaginary confrontation with
James Wait and attempts to put the irritation that he somehow inspires in them into
language, “all the simple words they knew seemed to be lost forever in the immensity of
their vague and burning desire” (98-99). For Marlow as for the crew of the Narcissus,
silence marks the confrontation with the real of the colonial symbolic order. In both
cases, the real cannot be made to signify within the symbolic order that it enables, and
therefore it is marked by silence.

Furthermore, we discover that this confrontation with the real effectively divides
the desire of both Marlow and the crew of the Narcissus. For Marlow, this conﬁ‘ontation
“had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth - the strange commingling of desire and hate”
(65). This division of desire, reiterated throughout the story as an ambivalent attraction
to black bodies, announces the approach of the real. A similarly violent ambivalence
continually marks Wait’s presence on the Narcissus. When introduced, he is alternately
described as “calm, cool, towering, [and] super ” and as “pathetic and brutal... tragic...
[and] mysterious” (12). Lacan writes that “there is an emergence of the subject at the
level of meaning only from its aphanisis in the Other locus” (Four Fundamental
Concepts 221). Meaning can only be instantiated as a result of this constitutive split, or
aphanisis. The lack of consistency, the preservation of the irreducible core of jouissance,

is the condition of the emergence of the subject within a signifying order. Throughout

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Conrad’s work, we witness a fascination with this core of inconsistency, this wound
within the subject or the social order. Probing this core of nothing that is also an excess
of signiﬁcation proves impossible, because it also forms a limit of the symbolic order.
Yet we ﬁnd that Conrad’s ﬁctional characters cannot resist prodding it, poking at it with a
stick, snifﬁng around its edges. We can understand the fascination with Wait’s body in
such terms. The play of desire over the surface of Wait’s body is perhaps made possible
by the way his body, as a materialization of the real, seems to perpetually conceal a secret
that it cannot be forced to reveal even through extended scrutiny. His body acts as a veil,
promising revelation yet refusing, in itself, to signify. The narrative gaze lingers on
Wait’s body from the moment it is introduced. The narrator comments that Wait’s hands
“seemed gloved” and describes Wait’s face as “inscrutable” and as a “mysterious...
repulsive mask” (12-13). The narrator’s gaze glides over Wait’s body, repeatedly
returning to the mask-like face. Wait’s face is ﬁrst described as disconnected eyes and
teeth hovering in the midst of an “indistinguishable” face. A couple of lines later we are
merely told that “the man’s face... was black.” In the following paragraph, we are told
that Wait possessed “a head vigorously modeled into deep shadows and shining lights — a
head powerful and misshapen with a tormented and ﬂattened face.” The narrator
continues to analyze the face as “pathetic and brutal... tragic... mysterious,” and ﬁnally
“a repulsive mas ” (12). Finally, his eyes, once again disconnected ﬁ'om his body,
“rolled wildly, became all whites” (13). Wait’s face startles the ﬁrst mate, causing him to
lose his “composure,” and renders the rest of the crew silent (13). Wait’s impenetrable
features inspire both a disturbed silence and a violently ambivalent emotional response,

and, in the end, refuse to signify or to be characterized as anything other than

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“indistinguishable,” “mysterious,” and “impenetrable.” We might notice that Wait’s
body, as a limit to signiﬁcation, gives rise to a play of desire as the narrative gaze roams
indiscriminately over it, unable to force upon it any form that is not immediately
overthrown or superceded by a contrary description. His eyes and teeth are disconnected
and refuse to be set in a consistent relation to the rest of his body; they seem to take on a
life of their own. This initial scrutiny ends, signiﬁcantly, with Wait’s cough,
“tremendously loud. .. like two explosions in a vault,” forcing both the “dome of the sky”
and the body of the ship to resound to its pulsation (13). Like the drumming in “An
Outpost of Progress” that turns the very land mass of Africa into an “immense drum”
(471), Wait’s cough seems to threaten to blow apart the symbolic order at the point of its
constitution. The booming cough, like the rhizomically layered drumming, seems on the
verge of forcing the very physical structure of the ship, which houses Conrad’s ideal
community of sailors (as “a small planet”), to become immediately present in its
irreducible physical irnmanence (21). The presence of Wait’s asignifying body threatens
some form of devastating disruption to Conrad’s ideal society ﬁom the point of its
introduction.

Conrad speaks of this indeﬁnable substance that eludes dialectical incorporation
into the subject or the community in terms of “race” with varying degrees of ambiguity
throughout his work. It is, of course, “the nigger” whose body forms the impenetrable
point of asigniﬁcation around which the community of the Narcissus is constituted, and
the mysterious thing that Wait’s impenetrable “mask” cannot be forced to reveal is “a
nigger’s soul” (12). The central role of the racialized body is explained in much more

deliberate and overt terms, however, in “Youth.” Like Heart of Darkness, “Youth”

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(composed one year later, in 1900) is a story told by Marlow (this time over a few glasses
of claret) to a group of important somebodies involved in imperial trade, “a director of
companies, an accountant, a lawyer,” and the unidentiﬁed and unnamed primary narrator
(like Heart of Darkness, “Youth” is related to us second-hand) (115). It is the story of a
voyage made by Marlow from London to Bangkok when he was twenty, many years
prior to the narration. As in The Nigger of the Narcissus, Marlow reﬂects repeatedly and
at some length on the ideal community of sailors. In attempting to explain the invisible
bond that unites them in their work, he notes that
There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful
like an instinct - a disclosure of something secret, of that hidden something, that
giﬁ of good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations.
[italics mine] (140)
The impenetrable core of identity, that mysterious “something” that is indefmable and
“hidden,” yet “solid like a principle,” is here deﬁned as “racial diﬁhrence.” The fact that
this abstract, indeﬁnable, and disembodied “something” that delineates the racial
community is described in terms of “difference” should also alert us to its dependence on
the deeply embodied racial other who is invariably discovered, as in the case of James
Wait, to form its absent center. We are therefore not surprised to discover that the Judea,
much like the Narcissus, counts a single black sailor amongst its crew, and that it is only
in strict contradistinction from this character that the white racial community is clearly
delineated. It is also only in opposition to this deeply embodied racial other that the
“hidden something” that comprises “racial difference” and that determines the fate not

only of nations, but of Conrad’s ﬁctional societies of sailors, springs into being. Thus,

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during a storm that disables the Judea and sends it back to England without having
completed its trip to Bangkok, the behavior of Abraham, the mulatto steward, stands out
distinctly:
As we had expected for days to see it swept away, the hands had been ordered to
sleep in the cabin — the only safe place in the ship. The steward, Abraham,
however, persisted in clinging to his berth, stupidly, like a mule — ﬁom sheer
ﬂight I believe, like an animal that won’t leave a stable falling in an earthquake.
[italics mine] (125)
I am less interested in the overt racism of this passage, according to which Marlow
equates Abraharn’s intellect to that of an animal, than in the choice of animal: comparing
Abraham to a mule emphasizes the mule-like stubbornness of his continued presence
despite the fact that the storm should have swept him away.9 The storm, the same natural
force that has bound the rest of the crew into a community centered around an indeﬁnable
“something,” should logically have carried off the unworthy mulatto, cowardly and
motivated by unadulterated fear. Yet, against seemingly impossible odds, Abraham
remains on board the Judea: “as if by a miracle... there he was sitting in his bunk,
surrounded by foam and wreckage, jabbering cheerfully to himself” (125). Abraham, in
this scene, remains in the midst of the ideal community of white sailors in spite of his
symbolic exclusion, an exclusion that is embodied and violently imposed within the
narrative by the impersonal natural force of a hurricane. He impossibly remains amidst
the wreckage that surrounds him. His nonsensical “j abbering” attests to his continued
presence following the storm, the asignifying noises issuing from his racialized body

being described as “cheerful,” in opposition to Wait’s more menacingly disruptive cough,

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because he testiﬁes to the continuation of the community following the violence of the
storm.

The episode of the storm functions, in this instance, as an allegory of the violent
necessity and simultaneous impossibility of the constitutive racial exclusion that gives
birth to Conrad’s ideal society. Marlow’s story of the events of the storm prior to the
description of Abraham’s punishment (and the miraculous continuation of his existence
in the face of this punishment) is, in fact, structured by a metonymic progression that
leads to the discovery of Abraham’s tortured body. As Marlow is on deck strapped to a
mast, he continually feels a hard object bumping against his leg. When he discovers that
it is a saucepan, he realizes that the deckhouse, containing the cook’s berth, has washed
overboard. When he goes to look for the cook he discovers Abraham, at which point the
episode concludes. Interestingly, having gone to look for the cook, fearing that he had
gone overboard, Marlow forgets to mention him again, not even informing us whether or
not he is still alive. The cook, in fact, only makes an appearance as a functional link in
the metonymic chain leading us to Abraham, and ceases to exist as soon as he has served
this ﬁrnction. Marlow concludes this scene with the observation that “[o]ne would think
that the sole purpose of that ﬁendish gale had been to make a lunatic of that poor devil of
a mulatto,” conspicuously alerting us to the narrative purpose of the episode (125). The
storm exists, in other words, to dramatize Abraham’s embodiment of the asignifying,
nonsensical core of the community. His persistent presence as the seemingly impossible
material realization of the otherwise purely abstract and “hidden” “principle” of race that

binds the community together is allegorized in this scene.

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If, in Wait, there is a consistent emphasis on the disruptive power of the objet
petit a, in the case of Abraham (in the scene following the storm) its generative power
would seem to be stressed. Regardless of these emphases, however, in both The Nigger
of the Narcissus and “Youth” we repeatedly witness the simultaneity of the generation
and disruption of community through a constitutive exclusion, an exclusion that is
materialized by a lone black body and a “jabbering” black voice. Furthermore, in both
cases Conrad represents in extremely elemental fashion the dependence of the abstract
and implicitly racially deﬁned imaginary community on the deeply embodied racial
other. The existence of the mysterious “something” (described as “nothing” in the
preface of N. N.) which provides Conrad’s “brotherhood of the sea” with solidity and
“completeness,” the “secret” and elusive thing that “shapes the fate of nations” and
deﬁnes the ideal community of sailors, is therefore dependent not only upon “race,” as
Conrad recognized, but additionally the embodiment of the racialized other. The notion
of belonging to a commrmity, and particularly the ideal of disembodied liberal citizenship
in the “public sphere” within which communication can take place, could hardly be more
starkly demonstrated to be fundamentally reliant on the deeply embodied, racialized, and
excluded other than it is shown to be in these two novels. In both cases Conrad presents
a community of the ship which he explicitly positions as an ideal community or a
“brotherhood of the sea,” and as a microcosm of society or “a ﬁagment detached from the
earth” (N. N. 21). In both stories we witness this mysteriously cohesive community
coalesce around a single, excluded, black crewmember, whose deep embodiment forms a
stark contrast to the intangible and ultimately indeﬁnable attribute that characterizes the

condition of abstract belonging to the ship’s community. In both novels, we therefore

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witness the genesis of race as an asymmetrical relationship, according to which a
disembodied whiteness can only be posited on the condition of the concomitant creation
of a profoundly embodied blackness. Blackness / embodiment forms, in this case, what
Judith Butler refers to as a “constitutive outside... composed of a set of exclusions that
are nevertheless internal to” the community “as its own nonthematizable necessity”
(Bodies That Matter 39). Thus, an incorporeal whiteness emerges through the
constitutive exclusion of a profoundly corporeal racially marked body, which comes to
function as the materialization of the central impossibility around which identity
coalesces. Racialized bodies therefore come to exist as material reminders of the
impossibility of the foreclosure of difference. Regarding this connection between
racialization and embodiment, David Eng remarks that “whiteness” can exist as “an
unnamed and invisible category” only on the condition of the projection of “racial
difference onto those bodies outside a urriversalizing discourse of whiteness” (141). The
symbolic logic of “whiteness” therefore requires bodies to set in opposition to an
intangible community belonging, a requirement that results in the production of race.
This production of race as an asymmetrical relationship between black bodies and
white citizens has other implications in The Nigger of the Narcissus and “Youth.”
Because the white community of sailors can never be fully consolidated, but can continue
to exist only in the circumstance of its own incompletion, its existence is dependent upon
the stubborn and seemingly unexplainable persistence of the black body in its midst. The
white brotherhood of sailors can come into being only through its own reiteration, each
reiteration representing a failure to achieve self-sameness. Each reiteration, and each

failure of foreclosure, requires a fresh confrontation with the abject body, the persistence

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of which is the condition of the continuation of the community. Thus, the reiteratidn
necessary for community requires the simultaneous reiteration or reenactment of
embodiment to be performed on the black body. The foundational exclusion has to be
repeated with each iteration. In The Nigger of the Narcissus and “Youth,” the
performance of embodiment takes the form of torture of the single black body that allows
the production of the intangible white social order.

As discussed above, the allegorical enactment of Abraham’s centrality to the
white community of sailors, in the form of the storm that batters the Judea, stages the
performance of embodiment in the form of the physical brutalization of Abraham at the
hands of natural forces. Recall that the storm in “Youth” batters Abraham’s body to the
extent that “[o]ne would think that the sole purpose of that ﬁendish gale had been to
make a lunatic of that poor devil of a mulatto” (126). Indeed, Abraham disappears from
the story at this point, perhaps because his cheerful, nonsense jabbering following the
storm seems to safely ensconce him in a state of madness that perfectly suits him for the
role of deeply embodied abject other within the social order of the Judea. In this regard,
James Wait provides an interesting contrast to Abraham. Wait’s body undergoes the
torture of an unrelenting’illness: considering both the place of Wait’s body within the
social structure (that of the objet a) and the omnipresence of the symptoms of his
sickness, we might argue that his body itself is the product of this illness. His “cough,
metallic, hollow, and tremendously loud” is hyperbolically described as “explosions in a
vault” that cause the “ship’s bulwarks to vibrate in unison” (13). The cough, in this
scene, ﬁrst marks Wait’s audible presence on the ship with the threat to blow apart the

physical structure of ship itself, an exaggeration that represents the threat of the ultimate

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destruction of the community of the ship, as it simultaneously announces Wait’s presence
for the ﬁrst time. Wait’s body continues to undergo the torture of illness throughout the
story, up until his death as the Narcissus enters the port and the crew disbands. Unlike
Abraham, Wait’s presence, symbolically necessary for the formation of Conrad’s ideal
community, constantly threatens to destroy the very community that it instantiates. The
manner in which the symptoms of illness constitute Wait’s body as the objet a
underscores this distinction from Abraham. Abraham’s role in constituting the secret
racial social order of the Judea at crucial points in “Youth” seems to be generally elided
on a thematic level through an effective strategy of containment: his potentially
disruptive centrality is contained ﬁrst through ﬁguring him as animalistic or bestial and
then through his enclosure within insanity, a convenient domestication of his symbolic
role as the embodiment of non-sense or that which eludes the symbolic order.

At this juncture, we should recall that the point of departure of this argument was
the assertion that Wait’s voice represents the presence of an elusive jouissance that
evades incorporation into the ideal community and preserves all of its disruptive power
amidst the system that Conrad desperately seems to wish could be closed off against any
disruptive possibility. As such, Wait’s voice, like the mass of asignifying noise that
becomes deﬁnitive of the continent of Africa in “An Outpost of Progress” and Heart of
Darkness, becomes a reality laying stubbomly and persistently outside of the colonial
symbolic order. His voice, as well as his body, therefore threaten to rend the social fabric
of the ship whenever the two invariably conﬁ'ont each other, as they must with each
reiteration and consequent failure of the attempt to foreclose the ideal community of the

ship against the physical presence of Wait, which is also, of course, the condition of

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existence of the community. Like the drumming that overwhelms the annihilating
commodiﬁcation of the colonial symbolic order in “An Outpost of Progress,” saturating
the African landscape until it resonates as a pure singularity out of reach of the
instrumental reductiveness of commodiﬁcation, Wait’s cough threatens to detonate the
symbolic order to which it gives rise. Just as the “discordant” and “shrill” noises that
disconcert Kayerts and Carlier pile on top of each other until they become all-pervasive,
intensifying and saturating the landscape until the land itself becomes “one immense
drum” (471), Wait’s cough causes the “ship’s bulwarks to vibrate in unison” (13), the
ship itself threatening to attain a pure immanent presence that would be irreducible to
signiﬁcation, and therefore would exceed the limits of incorporation of the community.
The irreducible singularity of Wait’s physical being, which threatens to stall the
dialectical link between the succession of moments that is the necessary condition for the
community of the ship to attain a minimal degree of positive consistency, never loses its
disruptive power during the entire journey of the Narcissus, and Wait only dies the
moment before the ship reaches its destination in London and the community of sailors
dissolves as each member of the crew goes his own way within the immensity of the
metropolis. The immanent limit of the community becomes, in the case of Wait and the
crew of the Narcissus, the impetus driving its reiterative existence. In this sense, in The
Nigger of the Narcissus Conrad presents a radically anti-teleological dialectical inquiry
into the conditions of possibility of community and identity within the context of race
that forms the historical horizon of possibility within which he operates. The community
in question does not undergo a progressive or evolutionary development in the course of

the narrative. Rather, it is constructed around a series of disjunctive moments in which

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the physical presence of Wait threatens its destruction. Synthesis, in this case, does not
obliterate difference by reducing it to self-sarneness or identity. Rather, we might
understand synthesis as a negotiation of identity and difference in the terms that Slovoj
Ziiek outlines in The Sublime Object of Ideology. “The synthesis,” Zizek argues,
is exactly the same as the anti-thesis; the only difference lies in a certain change
of perspective, in a certain turn through which what was a moment ago
experienced as an obstacle, as an impediment, proves itself to be a positive
condition... [The] logic of the “negation of the negation” [or synthesis] does not
entail any kind of return to positive identity, any kind of abolition, of cancellation
of the disruptive force of negativity, of reducing it to a passing moment in the
self-mediating process of identity. . . The “negation of the negation” does not in
any way abolish the antagonism, it consists only in the experience of the fact that
this immanent limit which is preventing me from achieving my full identity with
myself simultaneously enables me to achieve a minimum of positive consistency,
however mutilated it is. (176)
Within Zizek’s explanation of synthesis, the disruptive power of difference is not
eliminated, and the element of difference is not in itself altered. Rather than being
cancelled or abolished, this difference becomes both the limit and the condition of
identity, which can only be constituted around its own failure. Signiﬁcantly, ZiZek
argues that “the synthesis is exactly the same as the anti-thesis.” In other words, the
thesis and antithesis do not merge into a new whole that might be understood in terms of
the metaphor of birth, providing a Hegelian “organic unity” (Hegel 2; 6-7). Rather, the

synthesis retains the thesis and the antithesis as antagonistic elements, but inverts the

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predominance of the thesis over the antithesis. Etienne Balibar elucidates this process of
synthesis in Reading Capital when he writes that

To say that the modes of production are constituted as combination variants is

also to say that they transpose the order of dependence, that they make certain

elements move in the structure... from a place of historical domination to a place

of historical subjection. (282)
This inversion of thesis and antithesis that is achieved in the synthesis would seem to be
the process that Balibar has in mind when he states that “the capitalist mode of
production is constituted by ‘ﬁnding already there’... the elements which its structure
combines” (283). Balibar comes to this conclusion as a result of reﬂecting on the logical
impossibility of locating a pre-history of capitalism within the feudal mode of production
that does not rely on a “genealogical” process of reading feudalism in terms of the
analytical concepts provided by capitalism. Balibar therefore argues that the pre-existing
elements necessary for the genesis of capitalism are reinﬂected, within the synthesis
provided by the capitalist mode of production, as the effects of the very entity that they
generated (282). Capital, as the both the necessary precondition for the existence of
capitalism and the deﬁnitive effect of the system of capitalism, therefore serves as both
an external and internal limit to capitalism, because it acts as both the cause and effect of
the system it deﬁnes according to Balibar’s geneology.

Ziiek argues persuasively that such logic is compatible with a Lacanian
explanation of the generation of the subject: the “‘negation of the negation’ does not in
any way abolish the antagonism” between identity and difference; rather, it establishes

the fact that the very thing that prevents “me from achieving my ﬁrll identity with myself

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simultaneously enables me to achieve a minimum of positive consistency, however
mutilated it is” (Sublime Object 176). And returning, ﬁnally, to the character of James
Wait, we must note that the same logic is at work in the relationship between Wait, as the
objet a, and the race-based social order whose existence his bodily presence enables. The
dependence of Wait and the community of sailors on each other for their mutual
existence within the symbolic order means that each exists as both cause and effect of the
other. And while the possibility of a divinely ordained schema of evolution oriented
toward the horizon of an absolute good is lost in such a dialectic, the possibility of the
overthrow of the social order is contained within each iteration of community. In the
case of James Wait, we might note that as the objet petit a of the social order, his
emergence within each iteration of community is not only responsible for the mutilated
sense of positive consistency achieved by the community of the Narcissus. Additionally,
each time Wait’s body materializes the real, it becomes a potentially catastrophic source
of disruption. As the constitutive outside that is simultaneously internal to the
community, Wait “emerges within the system as incoherence, disruption, a threat to its
own systematicity” (Butler, Bodies That Matter 39).

When we move from James Wait to Abraham, we notice the fact that while
Abraham’s presence seems to serve a similar function in constituting the community of
sailors on the Judea, the strategies of containment of the potentially disruptive surplus of
meaning that is embodied by Abraham are much more effective. Signiﬁcant to the more
effective control of the black body is the naming of the secret “principle” of community
that can never be fully revealed but that nevertheless “shapes the fate of nations” as

“racial difference” (“Youth” 140). Within Conrad’s work, it would seem that explicitly

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giving this mysterious thing the name of “race” is the counterpart to the careful control of
the irruptions of the real connected to the repetitive emergence of the deeply embodied
racial other. “Race” might, in this case, be understood as an effective site of containment
of the problematic of commtmity. In connection with the apparent effectiveness of the
conscious designation of “race” as the principle of community are the overtly and
traditionally racist methods that Conrad uses to characterize Abraham, ﬁrst as an animal
and then as insane.

Within Conrad’s work, however, the centrality of the racialized body to the
formation of the ideal community of the sea is, perhaps, most substantively evidenced in
“The Secret Sharer.” In fact, if we follow an arc of possibility that starts with Wait as a
perpetually disruptive embodiment of the conditions of possibility / impossibility of
community and continues through Abraham as a much more comfortably contained
embodiment of the alien presence at the core of the ideal community, we might logically
end up with the completely subsumed racial other that we encounter in “The Secret
Sharer.” This arc, beginning in 1897 with the publication of The Nigger of the Narcissus,
progressing through “Youth” in 1902, and ending with “The Secret Sharer” in 1912,
chronologically marks the beginning, middle, and end of the most productive period of
Conrad’s literary career. This chronological progression is much less important,
however, than the fact that these three stories delineate the spectrum of possibility within
which Conrad’s literary quest for perfect communion takes place.

The initial objection to a reading of “The Secret Sharer” that underscores the
importance of the racialized body to the formation of community would certainly be that

any such body is apparently entirely absent from the story. This seeming absence,

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however, is in fact a violent erasure of the black body. As Caesar Casarino points out in
Modernity at Sea, “The Secret Sharer” was, according to Conrad, directly inspired by an
actual event: the murder of a sailor by an officer aboard the C utty Sark. In a letter,
Conrad writes that Leggatt

himself was suggested to me by a young fellow who was 2d mate (in the ‘60’s) of

the Cutty Sark clipper and had the misfortune to kill a man on deck. But his

skipper had the decency to let him swim ashore on the Java Coast as the ship was

passing through Anjer Straits. The story was well remembered in the Merchant

Service even in my time. (Qtd. in Casarino 242)
What Conrad omits in both the letter and the story, according to The Log of the Cutty
Sark, is that the murdered sailor in question was black. '0 We might view this violent
erasure of the black body from the text as a fulﬁllment that neither the illness that
ravaged Wait nor the storm that battered Abraham could accomplish: the removal of the
alien racial presence from the ideal community of the sea. Yet, because of (rather than
despite) this excision, we witness the fulﬁllment by the absent black body of the role
assigned by Conrad to James Wait in the introduction to The Nigger of the Narcissus.
The absent black sailor becomes, literally, the “nothing” that is simultaneously “the
center of the ship’s collective psychology” (xiv). In other words, this solution to the
problem of achieving the perfectly self-identical community simultaneously becomes a
crisis of identity.

The story opens with the nameless narrator / protagonist quietly surveying his
ship and its surroundings. As he does so, he makes the kind of observation that is so

often repeated within Conrad’s ﬁction, especially his sea stories:

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Only as I passed the door of the forecastle I heard a deep, quiet, trustful sigh of
some sleeper inside. And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as
compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life
presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by
the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its
purpose. [italics mine] (653)
The “deep, quiet, trustful sigh” is exactly the kind of asignifying noise that invariably
represents the dream of perfect communion in Conrad’s work. Here the sigh immediately
calls to the narrator’s mind the “great security of the sea,” and again we seem to be in the
midst of the promise of utopian society that so often deﬁnes the space of the ship. Like
the Narcissus, the unnamed ship in “The Secret Sharer” is initially posited as a space of
its own, “detached from the earth,” “a small planet” carrying “a great circular solitude
with her” (N. N. 21). Separate from the “unrest” of life on land, with its multitude of
“disquieting problems,” this ship, like the Narcissus, is deﬁned by its disconnection ﬁ'om
a larger and more complex society, by its “absolute straightforwardness” and “the
singleness of its purpose.”

Yet, we should also notice that as in the case of the Narcissus, this promise of a
perfect, self-identical being retreats with the horizon as an “unattainable frontier” (N. N.
21). In “Youth,” Marlow’s ﬁnal assessment of his time aboard the Judea characterizes
the space of the ship in terms of a promise withheld: he summarizes his experience on the
Judea as having been “always. .. looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it
is expected is already gone” (154). In this spirit, Marlow’s describes the sea, in his ﬁnal

remarks of “Youth,” as “the sea that gives nothing” (154). The encounter with the

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promise of communion here takes the form of a perpetually missed encounter.
Furthermore, if we take this passage ﬁ'om “Youth” together with the passage from “The

’9 ‘6

Secret Sharer” quoted above, in which the sea provides “great security, singleness of
purpose,” and “elementary moral beauty,” we realize that the sea is, in fact, an empty
placeholder: if it denies nothing in the ﬁrst passage, in the second it “gives nothing.” The
sea can stand for both an imaginary unity and the rupture of the real that is the condition
of this unity, and we might therefore complement David Simpson’s apt description of the
sea in Conrad as an “image of completion, the repository and synthesizing medium of all
created forms” with that of the sea as a site of constitutive alienation (120). We might, in
fact, reasonably assert that these are the two primary meanings given to the space of the
sea throughout Conrad’s work. It is apparent that Conrad’s narrators consciously deﬁne
the idyllic space of the ship not only in terms of the fulﬁllment of an ideal of self-
sameness, but equally in terms of a dialectic of alienation.

The centrality of the constitutive split of the subject to the deﬁnition of the perfect
identity possible within the space of the ship is, if anything, stated in much stronger terms
in “The Secret Sharer” than in “Youth.” Here, the narrator introduces himself not only as
“a stranger to the ship,” but additionally as “a stranger to myself” (650). Following this
introduction to the reader in terms of his failure to be quite himself, the narrator wonders
about his ability to attain “that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets
up for himself secretly” (651). In this way, the dialectic of identity that deﬁnes the space
of the ship is explicitly inaugurated with the narrator’s introduction of himself.

The presence of a space ofjouissance within identity that characteristically ﬁnds

its troubling mode of control in the reiterative torture of racialized bodies is explicitly

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introduced immediately following the narrator’s reﬂections on the ideal space of the ship.
Almost instantaneous with his notice of the reassuring sigh of the sleeping sailor he
notices Leggatt, his double, swimming naked alongside the ship. He describes Leggatt’s
appearance in terms that seem to indicate a sort of supernatural birth. Leggatt seemed “to
issue suddenly” from the sea, his appearance marked by “a faint ﬂash of phosphorescent
light” (654). The narrator initially perceives Leggatt’s body as “a headless corpse” (654).
Even after his head comes into view, the narrator cannot discern that it has any deﬁnable
shape, and Leggatt’s face is similarly indiscernible, appearing as “a dimly pale oval in the
shadow of the ship’s side” (654-55). The headlessness and facelessness of Leggatt’s
body is indicative of his lack of a deﬁnable identity as he is born into the narrator’s
consciousness. This lack of a stabilizing identity allows for the play of desire over his
body under the narrator’s gaze, as “the sea lightning played about his limbs at every stir”
(655). When the narrator ﬁnally clearly perceives Leggatt’s face, it is revealed to be an
exact duplicate of his own, “as though I had been faced by my own reﬂection in the
depths of a somber and immense mirror” (658).

Leggatt’s body unleashes a play of jouissance precisely because it marks the point
of anarnorphosis. This is the point that directs perception in such a way as to reveal “the
signiﬁer’s non-sense [that] erupts in the midst of Meaning” (Ziiek, Sublime Object 99).

It is an empty point within the ﬁeld of vision at which the mode of perception is altered in
order to reveal the difference in the midst of identity. The space of Leggatt’s body,
marked by its indeterminate form and the play of jouissance that it ignites, acts as the
point of disruption in the consistency of the symbolic ﬁeld that simultaneously guarantees

the uniformity of the symbolic ﬁeld. As in Lacan’s analysis of Holbein’s Ambassadors,

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the point of anarnorphosis directs the perception in such a way that the kernel of nonsense
in the midst of meaning enters the ﬁeld of vision, or the objet a is revealed (Lacan, Four
Fundamental Concepts 88-89). (In Holbein’s painting, the objet a is a skull that can be
made out only if one views the painting ﬁom a particular angle.) The narrative
equivalent of this process appears in “The Secret Sharer” when Leggatt’s body ﬁrst
appears as a point of anarnorphosis, a spot within the visual register that requires one to
refocus. The body, as an anamorphic spot, forces the narrator to refocus his vision in
such a way as to reveal the objet a of Leggatt’s face, within which “pure difference is
perceived as Identity” when the disruptive difference within the symbolic ﬁeld takes the
exact form of the narrator’s face (Zizek, Sublime Object 99). Leggatt’s body is therefore
the anamorphic point that allows the emergence of the ship as a space of model identity, a
space that is manifested through the “deep, trustful sigh” (653).

In Leggatt’s story of his murder of an insubordinate crewmember (the black sailor
of the actual event, whose race is excised from the text), we need to take note of
similarities to both “Youth” and The Nigger of the Narcissus. Leggatt is driven to
violence by “the cursed insolence” of the offending sailor (659). Leggatt relates that this
“insolence” was not unusual, but rather an ordinary part of his interaction with the
offending sailor. From the brief relation of this occurrence, we could ﬁnd a number of
parallels between this character and other rabble rousers in Conrad’s ﬁction. In The
Nigger of the Narcissus, for instance, it is not only James Wait, but the working class
Donkin (who is closely allied to Wait; he becomes Wait’s closest companion) whose
insolence almost drives the crew to mutiny. Of course, Donkin is not a sufficiently

disruptive presence on his own: he cannot act as the center of “the ship’s collective

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psychology” (N. N. xiv). This role requires the deep embodiment characteristic of the
racial body. The nameless sailor whose insolence is punished by the righteous Leggatt
seems to perform the same role in “The Secret Sharer.” The storm that batters both the
sailor’s and Leggatt’s bodies during the incident reminds us of the storm that batters
Abraham in “Youth,” the difference being that unlike Abraham, the sailor on the Sephora
does not emerge cheerﬁrlly babbling nonsense; rather, he dies. Furthermore, his death is
described in apocalyptic terms. As Leggatt grabs his throat there is “a crash as if the sky
had fallen on my head” (659). Hit by an enormous wave which both announces the
murder and literally conceals it ﬁ'om sight, the two men emerge, Leggatt still squeezing
his foe’s throat, the sailor apparently dead, described only as “black in the face” (659).
With the death of the sailor, the ship is torn not only by the storm, which, like the storm
that batters Lear, is perhaps representative of madness, but by the resultant “lunacy”
among the crew and “raving” of the captain (659). The loss of this particular sailor, in
other words, strikes the ship as a total psychotic breakdown of the social fabric, as though
the kernel of jouissance around which it had been formed was annihilated. “When I
came to,” Leggatt explains to his double, the “ﬁrst thing I heard. .. was the maddening
howling of the endless gale, and on that the voice of the old man” (660). The raving
lunacy of the captain overlaps the “maddening howling” of the gale, the two appearing to
be indistinguishable in this scene. It is difﬁcult not to read this scene as performing the
symbolic murder of James Wait that Conrad had been itching to perform for the previous
ﬁfteen years. Wait’s triumphant scorn is avenged, and the torture of the black body

ﬁnally culminates in death. The symbolic murder of the black sailor predictably leads to

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a psychotic breakdown of the ship’s community, resulting in the exile of Leggatt, who
then appears as a stranger on board a different, nameless ship as the captain’s double.
Naming, in fact, provides an important psychic transfer point for the action of
doubling, and it is therefore signiﬁcant that the narrator’s double, Leggatt, receives a
name while the narrator himself remains nameless. This fact does not testify to the
exchangeability of the “origin ” for the “copy.” Rather, the fact that the narrator and his
ship remain nameless while the double and his ship are named implies that the double, as
stated above, provides the point at which the narrator initially misrecognizes himself in
the ﬁeld of the Other. It is this misrecognition that inaugurates the subject through
aphanisis, or the constitutive split: if in a name, one misrecognizes oneself in the ﬁeld of
the Other in order to enter into the symbolic order, it would seem that Leggatt provides
this point of entry for the narrator. Leggatt, in this case, has the relationship to the
narrator of his own name: as I argued above, he is the point of anarnorphosis, the quilting
point of the symbolic ﬁeld of the narrator’s identity. Leggatt ﬁrnctions as a point de
capiton or a rigid designator: he is the point at which “pure diﬁ’erence is perceived as
Identity” (Zizek, Sublime Object 99). In appearing on board the second, nameless ship
Leggatt not only sets the narrative in motion, but inaugurates a new symbolic order,
different yet similar to the one that he annihilated on the old ship by virtue of murdering
the insolent sailor. And if The Nigger of the Narcissus provides an example of the
perverse obsession with the black body as the symptom (which is both the condition and
the result) of community, and “Youth” presents a similar but much less self-conscious
presentation of the black body as the symptom that allows for the quality of abstract

belonging to the white community, “The Secret Sharer” gives us, in a sense, Conrad’s

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ﬁnal solution to this problem, in which the resolution of the problem of community is
simultaneously a crisis of identity. The violent foreclosure of identity against the racial
other reemerges as an uncanny difference from the self.

Freud’s 1919 essay entitled “The ‘Uncanny’” in fact provides a very succinct
conceptual framework for understanding the sort of doubling that we witness in “The
Secret Sharer.” In this essay, Freud examines the way that the German word heimlich
contains within itself “two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very
different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what
is concealed and kept out of sight” (224-25). In its most archaic sense, heimlich refers to
something “belonging to the house or the family,” yet also means that which is
“concealed” or “withheld” (222-23). Additionally, heimlich is deﬁned as something that
is “haunted” (221). Heimlich becomes an important term for Freud because its use
invokes both that which is most familiar - the home, the community, or the family - and
at the same time that which haunts these elemental forms of belonging. Heimlich
therefore turns back on itself and invariably comes to mean unheimlich, that excess which
is concealed or withheld as the condition of belonging; it is a word that inescapably
invokes not only that which represents one’s identity, but the hidden surplus that serves
as a limit to this representation, that stands behind it like a ghost. In Freud’s terms,
unheimlich comes to refer to an experience (exempliﬁed in the encounter of one’s own
double) in which some archaic repression surfaces: “an uncanny experience occurs...
when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some
impression” (249). Julia Kristeva argues that for Freud, “the uncanny” therefore

expresses the most basic problem of psychoanalysis, for it points to the symptom at the

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core of identity. Kristeva describes “the concept — which arises out of Freud’s text — of
the unheilich” as “a crumbling of conscious defenses” resulting from an encounter with
the other that points “at the same time [to] a need for identiﬁcation and a fear of it” (332).
The confrontation with the double, in this case, is an uncanny encounter with the point of
symbolic identiﬁcation at which the consistency of one’s own being crumbles; it exposes
one to the “alienation” or “frmdamental division” from which “the dialectic of the subject
is established” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 221 ).

The encounter with the double in “The Secret Sharer” should therefore be
understood in terms of the ambivalent process of identiﬁcation that we observe
throughout Conrad’s writing, and which consistently deﬁnes encounters with racial
others. The gyration between an identiﬁcation with the symptom of the physical
presence of Aﬁican voices and the act of wishing a violent and permanent foreclosure of
one’s own identity against the symptom is famously enacted in Heart of Darkness. In his
note to the International Society for the suppression of savage customs, the ideal union
between Aﬁica and Europe that Kurtz outlines and that makes Marlow “tingle with
enthusiasm” at “the notion of an exotic Irnmensity ruled by an august Benevolence,”
Kurtz scribbles in the margins, “Exterminate all the brutes!” (46) In this case, the secret
wish for the violent foreclosure of identity against the intrusion of the other is literally
relegated to the margins. In the dual movement of Kurtz’s letter, the missionary ideal of
reducing difference to sameness is simultaneously the wish for murderous extermination
of the other, the benevolent missionary purpose is shown to be the subsumed desire for
genocide, and the approach of even an imaginary self-identical, perfectly uniﬁed identity

is shown simultaneously to be “horror” at the mere possibility of such an achievement.

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In “The Secret Sharer” we see the dual movement in Kurtz’s letter reduced to a single
point: the double.

If we once again‘ return to our three primary texts, The Nigger of the Narcissus,
“Youth,” and “The Secret Sharer,” we do not necessarily discover a progression, but
rather a layering or multiplication of possibilities for the textual management of the
stubborn intrusions of the other that would seem to be the founding condition of the
community that Conrad persistently uses the space of the ship to imagine. The Nigger of
the Narcissus, which is chronologically the ﬁrst of the three stories, provides what would
seem to be the most extended and deliberate examination of the burden of something
alien (to paraphrase Hegel) that inaugurates the dialectic of identity. Conrad’s
examination of this irreducible otherness at the core of identity takes the form of an
obsession in this novel, as an intolerable awareness of the presence of the racial other in
the form of a “nigger” repeatedly makes itself felt at the same instant as the sense of the
possibility of a perfectly harmonious and self-identical community. In the effort to tease
out an ideal communion of an achieved self-presence from this dialectic of identity,
however, Conrad reiteratively discovers only the body of Wait, which is experienced as
perpetually preventing the imaginary communion from manifesting itself, or as a
fundamental ﬂaw in the universal order, “the failure of some law of nature” (103). In
“Youth” we encounter what would seem to be a much less conscious, but nevertheless
narratively signiﬁcant, focus on the presence of a single black body amidst the
community of sailors. Once again, the racialized body appears as the precondition of
Conrad’s investigation of the possibility of community using the space of the ship. Also

signiﬁcant, I believe, are the more traditionally racist techniques of controlling the

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irruptions of the real represented by the racialized body that Conrad employs in “Youth.”
In this case we witness a much more effective imaginary suture, which, I would suggest,
results ﬁ'om Conrad’s willingness to draw on the preconstituted imaginary discourses of
racial science. In contrast to The Nigger of the Narcissus, where we observe an emphasis
on the persistent disruptive capabilities of the racialized body as the object a, in “Youth”
the very lack of conscious attention directed toward the symptomatic presence of
Abraham, the mulatto steward, suggests the dynamic power of racist discourse in
effectively providing an imaginary suture for intrusions of the real. Labeling Abraham a
mulatto, characterizing his speech as “jabbering,” and portraying his actions as childlike
and cowardly apparently effectively represses and even sublimates the space of the real
through the imaginary formation of “race” in such a way that attests to the dynamic
power of racism and helps us understand its continued importance through the past four
hundred years of European colonialism up to the present day.

Finally, in “The Secret Sharer,” Conrad presents the ideal community of the ship
ethnically cleansed of the racial other through a symbolic murder that is doubly
disavowed, both in the story itself and later in the letter explaining the story. In ﬁnally
performing this symbolic murder, however, Conrad fails to discover a point of pure self-
presence or perfect communion. What he uncovers is rather a certain alienation, or an
originary spacing that inaugurates identity as necessarily different from itself, and that
introduces the hallucination of a uniﬁed identity as always already under erasure. In
“The Secret Sharer,” Conrad’s unnamed narrator experiences identity simultaneously as
absolute difference, in the form of his double. This collapse of identity and difference

into an originary difference from the self is effected because the body of the murdered

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black sailor had functioned, following the symbolic logic of all three of Conrad’s stories
examined in this essay, as the objet a that guarantees the consistency of the symbolic
order. The murder is therefore depicted in terms of a total psychotic breakdown of the
community of the ship.

What this murder reveals, of course, is not a perfect self-presence that the black
sailor’s bodily existence has somehow been preventing, but rather that the objet a of his
body forms the point at which one (mis)recognizes oneself in the ﬁeld of the Other. The
objet a is the point of one’s own entry into the symbolic order, or the subject’s “shadow
among objects” (ZiZek, Metastases 83); it is the necessary / impossible point at which the
subject (mis)recognizes itself within symbolic order. It is the placeholder of the subject
that manifests the “primal separation” of the subject ﬁ‘om itself, the “self-mutilation” that
is the condition of symbolic existence (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 83). To
expose it as such is to “traverse the fantasy” and recognize a difference from the self as
the necessary / impossible structure of identity (ZiZek, Looking Awry 137). In presenting
the objet a as the mirror image of the protagonist, “The Secret Sharer,” in effect, exposes
its ﬁrnction of inaugurating and locating the subject within the symbolic order. In doing
so, it encourages us, on some level, to traverse the imaginary content of this placeholder
of the real, which the context provided by this essay reveals once again to be the fantasy
of “race” that predominates in much of Conrad’s ﬁction.

To traverse the fantasy of race, in this case, means to recognize race as a
historically particular imaginary content occupying the space of the real. To recognize
race as fantasy, in this sense, allows us to account for both its paradoxical and malleable

nature and its continual and continually disavowed inﬂuence, and to simultaneously

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recognize its radical contingency in relation to history. More speciﬁcally, recognizing
the fantasy of race will hopefully raise the debate regarding Conrad’s views on race to a
more substantive level, a level that forces us to reckon with its centrality to his writing.
We are no longer able to deal with race as though it were simply something that Conrad
was ﬂee to accept or reject in its entirety, to embrace as a “racist” or to reject (albeit in an
extremely arcane and indirect way) through a gloriously purifying gesture of literary
irony. Conceptualizing race in Conrad’s writing as the content of a Lacanian fantasy
therefore not only directs our attention toward an important aspect of his work that has so
far lain dormant, but, most importantly, forces us to think about it in the context of the
colonial ideology which formed the historical horizon of possibility within which his

persistent questioning into the possibility of community took place.

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The “Bestial Mark” of Race

I would like to begin this chapter with a digression in order to refocus the
argument that I have developed in the previous two chapters. In chapter one, focusing
mainly on Marx’s Capital, Vol. I and Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus ” and Heart
of Darkness, I argued that racialization, in the late Victorian or early modern period, was
intimately connected with the logic of the commodity. In order to give this argument
greater speciﬁcity, I analyzed a particular form that racialization took in Heart of
Darkness. According to a metonymic logic of contact, bodies that came into intimate
physical contact with commodities (understood as objects that materialized the originary
disjunction of capitalism, and thus embodied its logic of inﬁnite systemic desire) became
deeply embodied, or were, in effect, racialized. This particular logic of race, which I
would associate with the “scientiﬁc” racism that became predominant during this period,
in effect involved the inscription of certain physical stigmata on speciﬁc bodies through
contact with commodities. These stigrnata were then organized into a semiotics of the
body that I would argue is coextensive with the “scientiﬁc” view of race. In chapter two,
I focused on three sea stories of Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus, ” “Youth,” and
“The Secret Sharer” in order to further develop a particular strand of this argument.
Because racialized bodies function as a site at which the foundational disjunctions and
originary uncertainties of a given symbolic order are organized, systematized, and
controlled, the nature of racialization could be illuminated through the Lacanian logic of
the objet a. In each of these stories, I revealed how Conrad’s imaginary ideal of the
community of sailors was dependent upon the constitutive exclusion of a single, deeply-

embodied black character. Because this disembodied racial brotherhood was in each case

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reliant on the profound embodiment of the racial other, this ideal community was often
explicitly, and always implicitly, an order that required racial violence in order to sustain
itself. Thus, we discover that some form of torture of the single black body is required to
sustain the racial brotherhood of sailors in each story. In each case, it would seem that
Conrad creates a social imaginary that exists by virtue of violence enacted on racial
bodies.

My digression is a brief one, to a period about ﬁfty years prior to the majority of
the literature under discussion. In 1855, on the eve of the American Civil War, Frederick
Douglass published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. Early in
this book, Douglass takes issue with those who seek a Biblical justiﬁcation for slavery.
Speciﬁcally, Douglass addresses the popular argument within the American South that
blacks are “the lineal descendents of Ham,” that their dark skins are the mark of God’s
displeasure, and that they are therefore ordained by an act of God to serve as slaves (59).
Rather than attack this argument textually, his strategy for addressing Biblical arguments
in favor of slavery elsewhere, Douglass chooses to debunk this line of reasoning by
pointing out that “thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who — like myself —
owe their existence to white fathers” (60). Therefore, beginning his argument with the
acceptance of the absurd premise that God created Africans in order that white folks
might have slaves, he satirically remarks that “according to the scriptures, slavery in this
country will soon become an unscriptural institution” (59-60).

I mention this passage not only to express my appreciation of one of Douglass’s
rare forays into satire, but because of the manner in which Douglass exposes, through

ridicule, the obvious political motivation behind such an argument. Douglass

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understands the game that is being played: the logical incommensurability of the divine
act with any empirical reality is being exploited: within the symbolic order of slavery, the
empty placeholder of the real is ﬁlled in with a certain imaginary content, the will of
God, that serves both to justify slavery and place it beyond criticism. We might speculate
that it is because he wishes to expose the nature of this ideological game that Douglass
refrains from seriously engaging the argument. Recognizing the will of God, in this case,
as an empty placeholder that can be ﬁlled with any particular content, Douglass replaces
it with the perverse desire to exploit others sexually. The irony that Douglass generates
in this passage is therefore not simply the result of the suggestion that the Biblical logic
which holds race to be a divinely-ordained truth and therefore outside of the realm of
empirical questioning is, in fact, nothing more than a disavowal of a very worldly motive:
the desire to sexually exploit a group of women without legal or moral consequences.
The irony of this passage seems more speciﬁcally to result from its exposure of the form
of the argument for its simplicity and its arrogance.

My contention is that Douglass identiﬁes the essential logic of race through this
satirical deconstruction of the “sons of Ham” argument. Race is, within the view that
Douglass attacks, divinely ordained, and the dark skin of blacks is the mark of God’s
displeasure. In this view, race originated through an ultimately unfathomable act of God.
This act was registered through marks on the bodies of certain people, who were
racialized through this act. The dark skin of Africans marks them as the abjected others
of those in God’s good grace (whites, of course), and the originary act of exclusion /
creation must be indeﬁnitely reiterated through the institution of slavery. Slavery itself

becomes, in this account, a reenactment of an original, incomprehensible act of God, a

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reiterative performance of God’s will. The original act is therefore present in the
reenactment as the kernel of nonsense, the incomprehensible moment of decision, which
escapes incorporation into the series of events that it inaugurates (the enslavement of
blacks). “Race” designates, in this case, what Derrida identiﬁes as the “ungraspable. ..
instant,” the “exceptional decision which belongs to no historical, temporal continuum”
(“Force of Law” 274).

In this chapter, I attempt to perform a critical operation similar to Douglass’s
exposure of the kernel of nonsense at the center of the Biblical justiﬁcation for slavery in
regard to what is often considered a diametrically opposite view of race. Speciﬁcally, I
intend to demonstrate the performative basis of “race” in the scientiﬁc sense of the term
that becomes preValent during the half century following Douglass’s criticism of the
apologetics of slavery. I will focus on H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, a novel
that allegorically stages the beginnings of society. I will concentrate on how the attempt
to give the representation of a necessary / impossible origin a logical structure and, in
doing so, grant it an empirical reality, relies on racial discourse. This account of the
mythical origins of society represses and disavows its performative basis, and the space
opened by this traumatic disavowal is given an imaginary structure (and therefore an
empirical reality) through the application of racial hierarchy. “Race,” in this case, names
a form of imaginary suture of the rupture of the real that grants an evolutionary narrative
structure to this allegory. “Race” names the inability of Moreau to come to terms with
the performative act that both instantiates and exceeds a quasi-religious social “Law”:
Wells’s account of the origin of the Law cannot acknowledge the supplementarity of

performative acts which always exceed the law that they reiteratively enact and thereby

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instantiate. We will therefore discover that in The Island of Dr. Moreau the “foundation
of law... is a ‘performative’ event that cannot belong to the set that it founds,

inaugurates, or justiﬁes. Such an event is unjustiﬁable within the logic of what it will
have opened” (Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” 57). Having established the performative
foundation of a law that contains, in both cases, an implicit racial hierarchy, I will
examine how the excessive foundation of the performative event makes itself felt through
a scopic drive in the character of Moreau, who obsessively attempts to contain this
foundational excess within some object in the visual ﬁeld and then eliminate it; in doing
so, he hopes to inaugurate a reign of pure empirical rationality, within which all
knowledge will be available to his own god-like mind.

The nature of law as a set of rules generated through an always originary
performative act that conceptually exceeds the legal order that it inaugurates is
demonstrated in a relatively direct fashion in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Wells’s
exploration of rapidly changing notions of humanity at the end of the nineteenth century
in Moreau provides a very fertile ground for this type of examination because one of the
novel’s main thematic concerns is the relation of scientiﬁc and religious
conceptualizations of humankind. Thus we discover in Moreau not only an examination
and critique of the hubris contained in the belief of Wells’s contemporaries that the
biological and social sciences could eliminate the unknown or the excessive ﬁ'om the
calculus of humanity. Also, we ﬁnd an examination of religious belief, and religious
emotion or rapture in particular, which anticipates numerous twentieth-century
articulations of religion as a sort of sublirnated sexuality. Moreau, a prototype of the mad

scientist found throughout later science ﬁction, expresses this belief unambiguously in a

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conversation with Prendick, the narrator and amateur biologist who is stranded on
Moreau’s isolated island in the South Paciﬁc as a result of a shipwreck. In the course of
this conversation, Moreau describes his experiment, that of creating humans from
animals, to a horriﬁed Prendick. Moreau’s experiment is both medical and social: he is
interested both in biologically altering the creatures through medical experimentation to
resemble humans in thought and form, and in shaping them into social creatures who
recognize themselves as part of a common society. While these two projects are never
clearly separated, that of shaping the animals into a society that mimics human society
centers explicitly around Moreau’s instantiation and enforcement of “the Law.” Moreau
explains
There’s something they call the Law. Sing hymns about “all thine.” They build
themselves their dens, gather huh and pull herbs — marry even. But I can see
through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of
beasts, beasts that perish — anger, and the lusts to live and gratify themselves...
Yet they’re odd. Complex, like everything else alive. There is a kind of upward
striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity. It
only mocks me. (89-90)
Several aspects of Moreau’s speech deserve comment. First, Moreau’s notion of the Law
equates the attachment to a social code of behavior with the attachment to a religious law.
The Law therefore mediates the relationship of the “beast folk” to both society
(agriculture, social organization, and sexual relations) and religion (the “complex”
tendency toward “upward striving”). Moreau ascribes the emotional bond of the beast

folk to this social / religious order to “waste sexual emotion.” This claim is, in fact, a

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repetition of Moreau’s statement just a few pages earlier, that “much indeed of what we
call moral education is such an artiﬁcial modiﬁcation and perversion of instinct...
suppressed sexuality [is trained] into religious emotion” (82). And while the passage
from Frederick Douglass mentioned earlier suggested nothing more than that the
religious justiﬁcation of slavery obscured the true motive (rather than that the two stood
in some sort of necessary relation), Moreau suggests an intimate connection between
religion and sexuality, in that religious belief is a result of the diversion of “sexual
emotion” toward the purposes of building a society. In other words, Wells’s character
puts forth the theory that social bonds, which are created through an attachment to a
common law, are by their very nature religious, and that this religious bond upon which
society is built is the result of a careful re-direction of “suppressed sexuality.”

Moreau, however, also indicates his discomfort with this equation when he states
that within his project of creating humans there is something that “mocks” him, or eludes
a full and satisfactory explanation. And while Moreau’s ﬁrst statement directly equates
suppressed sexuality with the creation of “religious emotion,” he ﬁlls out the second
statement with the relatively vague terms “curiosity” and “vanity,” which creates
considerable ambiguity. Moreover, Moreau ﬁequently conﬂates this “complex... upward
striving” that continually frustrates his understanding with that which is most primal or
primitive in his humanized beasts. Thus, that which at times seems most human in the
beast folk, such as some aspect of their religion that somehow exceeds the equation of
religion with suppressed sexuality, can easily reverse into that which is most primitive or

bestial. In the same conversation with Prendick, Moreau explains that

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[T]here is still something in everything I do that defeats me, makes me
dissatisﬁed. . . And least satisfactory of all is something that I cannot touch,
somewhere — I cannot determine where — in the seat of the emotions. Cravings,
instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange reservoir to burst suddenly and
inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear. . . Each time I
clip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out
all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own. (88-89)
In this passage, it is not the nature of “religious emotion” that escapes Moreau, but
“[c]ravings, instincts, [and] desires” that cannot be neatly trained into a sense of social or
religious duty. Moreau speaks of a “somewhere” that seems to indicate a nowhere, an
empty place that cannot be located within Moreau’s cognitive map but which stands in
intimate relation to it. It is a space within which the most exalted “upward striving” can
transform in the course of a statement into the most depraved and anti-social “instinct” or
“desire.” And it is within the space of this elusive somewhere that the beast folk are
easily and repeatedly equated with “humanity.” Furthermore, Moreau meets this place
without a location, this undetermined thing that eludes incorporation into societal ends,
with a reiterative violence, a “bath of burning pain,” by which he metaphorizes his
surgical operations performed without anesthetic. His stated goal in performing these
operations is to “burn out” that which eludes the rational order of his created society, and
in doing so to create a purely “rational creature.” We therefore notice in this passage that
the medical procedures that Moreau performs to alter the shape and the mental capacity
of the animals are sublated to the end of building a purely rational society, one in which

there is nothing to elude his own god-like mind that stands behind it as creator. Moreau’s

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operations on the bodies and brains of the animals, which, he indicates, inevitably fall
short of producing rational creatures, are therefore superceded by the need to subject his
experimental subjects to pain. It is through pain itself that the excessive something that
eludes incorporation into society on the purely rational plane will be annihilated.

Moreau, in an ongoing orgy of violence, attempts to eliminate the irrational kernel of
nonsense from his experiment, and, in doing so, to establish himself in the place of, as the
personiﬁcation of, what Ziiek terms “the big Other,” the god-like mind that is imagined
to stand behind the symbolic order and guarantee its rational consistency (Looking Awry
135).

The “bath of pain” functions as a performative act throughout Moreau,
instantiating “the Law” that the beast folk must not only commit to memory in order to
achieve the status of being “men,” but which they ritualistically recite as part of a
religious ceremony. When Prendick gets lost while exploring the island, and ﬁnds
himself among the beast folk, he is only provisionally recognized as a man until he
participates in a ceremonial recitation of the Law. Therefore the Ape Man, who ﬁrst
introduces Prendick to the community of beast folk as a man, makes it clear within the
same statement that Prendick will not be accepted within the community of men unless
he learns the Law: “‘It is a man. He must learn the Law’” (64). There are no men, in
other words, other than those subjects who are interpellated through the ceremonial
recitation of the Law. The ﬁrst statement that is addressed to Prendick is a simple
command: “Say the words” (65). In this scene we witness a complex causality of the
subject, according to which Prendick must ﬁrst be recognized as a man in order to enter

the community of the beast folk, but at the same time cannot be recognized as a member

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of the community of men and therefore as fully human until he has been indoctrinated
into the community through the performance of recitation. When Prendick obediently
recites the Law along with the group, his response to the command to “Say the words”
would seem to provide an elemental and mythical scenario of interpellation similar to
Althusser’s example of a person becoming a subject by responding to the “interpellation
or hailing” of a policeman. By turning toward the policeman, and therefore recognizing
himself as the subject of the policeman’s address, the person in question “becomes a
subject” (Althusser, “Ideology” 162).

In Wells’s mythical staging of the inauguration of the subject in Moreau, we must
recognize the complex causality of the performative event: that is, that the performative
event appears simultaneously to be the result of an internal causality (Prendick is only a
man following his ritualistic interpellation) and an external causality (Prendick had to be
recognized as a man in order for the hailing to take place), a logic that Althusser seems to
reject in explaining his own scenario of interpellation (which doesn’t take narrative form,
but rather is posited as a disconnected event). Althusser argues that

what thus seems to take place outside ideology... in reality takes place in

ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place

outside it... ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects,
which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated
by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition:

individuals are always-already subjects. (“Ideology” 163)

Recognizing that subjects appear to both precede and to be the result of ideology,

Althusser chooses to emphasize the latter aspect of the aporia, arguing that the interior

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logic of ideology precedes that which is exterior to ideology; in other words, the internal
logic of ideology creates the illusion of its own exterior. Judith Butler, in a critique of
Althusser’s scenario of interpellation, argues that according to Althusser, the
interpellation of the subject through the inaugurative address of state authority
presupposes not only that the inculcation of conscience already has taken place,
but that conscience, understood as the psychic operation of a regulatory norm,
constitutes a speciﬁcally psychic and social working of power on which
interpellation depends but for which it can give no account. (Psychic Life of
Power 5)
Butler therefore argues that Althusser’s refusal to grant proper status to this foundational
paradox within his system functions as a form of disavowal, causing the disavowed
paradox to circulate through the logic of ideology in unacknowledged ways. In
opposition to Althusser’s decision to privilege the interior form of causality over the
exterior form, Butler opts to recognize the aporia of the originary causality of the subject
as a limit of ideology. In other words, “the subject” forms a location at which the internal
contradictions of the logic of ideology as posited by Althusser forms an aporia, which she
therefore recognizes as a limit to Althusser’s logic of ideology. Rather than breaking this
aporia with the decision to choose one or the other (the subject either precedes or is the
result of ideology), Butler concludes that “the subject is neither fully determined by
power, nor fully determining of power. .. [because] the subject exceeds the logic of
noncontradiction, is an excrescence of logic, as it were.” More concisely, Butler states

that “the subject exceeds either / or” (17).

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It is this sort of excessive subject, rather than the subject of Althusser’s
interpellation, that is perforrnatively enacted with Prendick’s inclusion in the ritual
chanting of the Law. The Law itself takes the form of a series of prohibitions that
incorporate this foundational uncertainty of what it means to occupy the space of
subjectivity:

“Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not men?

Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not men?

Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not men?

Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not men?

Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not men?” (65)

Prendick describes the recitation as continuing for some time in this reiterative form, “on
to the prohibition of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible and most
indecent things one could well imagine” (65). The Law therefore takes the form of a
series of prohibitions, followed by the declaration that the prohibition is the Law, each
formulaic prohibition then being followed by the question, “Are we not men?” The
excessive nature of the action of interpellation, in this scene, is felt in the disjunction
between each declarative statement of the Law and the question that follows; it is as
though each declarative statement contains within itself the uncertainty of whether or not
the statement of the Law is sufﬁcient to make men. The reiterative nature further testiﬁes
to this excessive structuring of the Law, as though the uncertainty released by each
declaration might be contained by the next.

The “long list” of prohibitions culminates with a series of statements regarding

the enforcement of the Law, or the threat thereof:

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“His is the House of Pain.

His is the Hand that makes.

His is the Hand that wounds.

His is the Hand that heals.” (66)
The chant therefore indicates Moreau’s “bath of pain” as the creative force behind the
Law, which is simultaneously the power of enforcement. It is as though the endless list
of prohibitions, each merely reiterating the uncertainty or incompleteness of subjection,
ﬁnally culminates in a return to the violence through which the Law is instantiated and
enforced, as though the ultimate meaning of the list, the ﬁnal containment of the excess
of the interpellative process of the act of recitation of the Law, is contained in the “bath
of pain” through which the animals are created as human subjects. Thus, the uneasy
question following the statement of each prohibition, “Are we not men?” is replaced with
the chant of “none escape” following the list of Moreau’s seemingly supernatural powers
of creation (67). The ﬁnal words of the performance underscore the suturing effect of the
reference to the bath of pain: “‘None escape. . . Punishment is sharp and sure. Therefore
learn the law. Say the words” (68). When the list of Moreau’s creative power is
extended to include control over the natural world (“‘His is the lightning-ﬂash,’ we sang.
‘His is the deep salt sea.”’ [67]), Prendick is struck with the “honible fancy. . . that
Moreau. .. had infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of deiﬁcation of himself” (66).
Once again we are struck with the fact that Moreau has attained, within this ritual, the
status of the Lacanian big Other, the god-like ﬁgure who provides imaginary suture for
the rupture of the real, which is felt, in this case, as the failure of interpellation or the

excessive structure of the subject of interpellation. Moreau’s omnipotent creative power

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here stands in as a guarantor of symbolic consistency, according to which the excessive
structure of subjectivity that cannot be contained by any prohibition or list thereof is
ﬁnally supplied with an imaginary containment from which “none escape.” Following
Lacan, we might state that within the linguistic chain through which the ritualistic
subjection is performed in the chapter that Wells entitled “The Sayers of the Law,” the
ﬁgure of Moreau serves as the personiﬁed ﬁgure of the master signiﬁer, or the “subject-
supposed-to-know.” Moreau, in the saying of the Law, functions as the “signiﬁed that...
is given to designate as a whole the effect of there being a signiﬁed, inasmuch as it
conditions any such effect by its presence as signiﬁer” (Lacan, “Meaning of the Phallus”
80). Moreau and his power to inﬂict pain serve as the point at which the play of the
signiﬁer and the deferral of meaning along the signifying chain appear to cease, and
therefore serve as the point at which meaning appears to achieve a self-consistent, uniﬁed
being, disguising the fact that “man cannot aim at being whole” (Lacarn, “Meaning of the
Phallus” 81). It is within the god-like mind of Moreau, with the power to create and
destroy, both of which are reduced, in the chant, to his power to inﬂict pain, that the
symbolic unity of the subjects, or “men” whom he has created, is imagined to reside. In
Moreau’s conversation with Prendick, however, we discover that this failure to capture
and freeze meaning and thereby gant a symbolic unity to one’s being eludes Moreau just
as it eludes his subjects. There is always, according to Moreau, the “something that I
cannot touch” within his subjects that leads to the reiterative torture under his surgical
knife in the attempt “to burn out all the animal” (88-89).

Because Wells provides us, with Moreau’s obsessive attempt to destroy the

necessary / impossible kernel of the real within his subjects, with such a pristine example

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of the manner in which physical torture is employed to control the foundational excess of
subjectivity, I would like to recall, at this juncture, the discussion from the last chapter
regarding the reiterative torture of the black body that Conrad employs in The Nigger of
the “Narcissus ” and “Youth.” In Nigger of the “Narcissus, ” James Wait undergoes the
torment of illness, and his agony becomes deﬁnitive of his place within the community of
sailors on the “Narcissus.” While it is relatively de-emphasized within the story as a
whole, Abraham is similarly battered by the storm in “Youth” at the very point in the
narrative where the white sailors coalesce into a community that is deﬁned by Marlow,
the narrator, as “that hidden something, that gift of good or evil that makes racial
difference” (140). As I argued regarding these texts, the trace of the other cannot be
removed from the implicitly (or explicitly) racial community, and in the case of Niger of
the “Narcissus ” and “Youth” we see how this constitutive failure results in the reiterative
performance of embodiment and exclusion being performed on the single black body
through depictions of physical torture. Moreau’s method of interpellation of his subjects
through torture demonstrates, perhaps even more baldly, this logic of racialization, or the
creation of the racial other through abject embodiment. His attempts to burn out the
secret, unnamable something that resides at an equally obscure somewhere within the
bodies of the beast folk is his attempt to eliminate the obscene stain of the real ﬁ'om his
subjects. What seems to elude Moreau, just as it eludes Marlow in “Youth” and the
narrator in Nigger of the “Narcissus, ” however, is the fashion through which this
structurally necessary failure constitutes the very social order within which he moves.
The surgical torture through which Moreau attempts to create perfectly intelligible

creatures is represented, quite directly, to performatively instantiate the Law of the beast

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folk. Within the chant, the “House of Pain” becomes the site of containment of the
failure of interpellation through which the beast folk are constituted as subjects and as a
society.

Given this structural similarity between Conrad’s idealized commurnities of sailors
and Wells’s dark, fantastic vision of a society of half-human creatures, we are not
surprised to discover that the beast folk are identiﬁed and placed in relation to
“civilization” through the employment of a schemata of race. While Wells’s exposure of
the structure of his ﬁctional community seems to be a geat deal more deliberate than that
of Conrad, Wells seems, at the same time, perhaps less aware of the role that race plays
within this structure than Conrad, who has moments in which he is apparently quite
cognizant of the fact that his ideal of community belonging is dependent on racial
exclusion. Wells’s use of race, in Moreau, seems to be largely unconscious in at least
two senses of the word. First, race provides a structured series of reference points
regarding of the evolution of society. We might understand this mechanical application
of the belief that different “races” represent different stages of the evolution of mankind
as ideological in the sense that Wells unquestioningly accepted the racism that was at the
center of the development of the biological and social sciences at the turn of the century.
We might understand, for instance, Moreau’s description of his gorilla-man as “a fair
specimen of the negoid type” to explain a stage in the progess of his research, or
Prendick’s description of one of the beast folk as having “a black negoid face,” in this
same sense (86; 27). The signiﬁcance of Wells’s use of racial schemata to provide an
index of evolutionary development does not, of course, reside in the dull question of his

personal responsibility or lack thereof for the obvious racism of this schemata It is to be

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found, rather, in the way that this type of ideologically given racism overlaps with the
more strictly psychoanalytic application of the term “unconscious.” Prendick
experiences an inexplicable revulsion for the beast folk from his ﬁrst encounter with
them. In this ﬁrst encounter with a creature described as “Montgomery’s strange
attendant,” Prendick describes how “[t]hat black ﬁgure, with its eyes of ﬁre, struck down
through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of
childhood came back to my min ” (18). The fact that Prendick must express his
revulsion through an allusion to the uncanny ﬁgures of childhood nightmares is obviously
signiﬁcant, as is the fact that his ambivalent, horriﬁed fascination with the creature is
attributed to a physical quality that cannot be pinpointed but is nevertheless deﬁnitive of
his encounter with the creature. Thus, the creature’s eyes ﬁrst draw Prendick’s attention,
and while they ﬂash in a way that “is not uncommon in human eyes,” the “thing came to
me as stark inhumanity” (18). There is a sense that some profoundly physical quality (for
Prendick searches the physical features of the beast folk obsessively in order to locate it)
marks the creature as nightrnarishly inhuman and human at the same time, yet this
physical quality cannot be named or ascribed to any particular feature or gesture. This
impression “passed as it had come,” and, in the end, can only be described in terms of
self-canceling contradictions that indicate nothing more than a failure of language to
capture the real meaning of “the thing” (18).

We encounter a limit to signiﬁcation in the body of this beast man, a limit that is
frequently reiterated and that Wells often meets with terms drawn from racial science.
Thus, we might return to both of the examples of racialization given above. When

Prendick ﬁrst lands on the island, he repeats his repulsed fascination with Moreau’s

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creatures, a fascination with a “something” that eludes language: “I saw only their faces,
yet there was something in their faces - I knew not what — that gave me a spasm of
disgust. I looked steadily at them, and the impression did not pass, though I failed to see
what had occasioned it” [italics mine] (26). Again, the elusive “something” is “in” their
faces, yet it cannot be located or named. Prendick’s fascinated gaze lingers over the
bodies of the beast folk, cataloguing their various deformities, their “protruding lower
jaws and bright eyes,” their unusually short legs and long bodies (26). Yet this list of
physical deformities fails to capture the strange quality that is deﬁnitive of the beast folk;
it eludes Prendick, driving him to scrutinize the beast folk ever more closely in order to
discover this thing that at once dwells “in” these bodies and yet remains somehow
separate ﬁom any particular physical feature, or goup of features, or even the long list of
features that he compiles. At the end of the passage, Prendick describes one of the
creatures on which his gaze lingers as having “a black negoid face,” as though this
uncanny quality requires the vocabulary of race if it is to be inscribed within a human
subject (27).

If we examine the other example, that of Moreau’s descriptions of one of his
creations as “a fair specimen of the negoid type,” we discover a similar use of the term
(86). Moreau, in this case, indexes his experimental subjects racially in order to measure
the “progess” of his research in the face of his ultimate, repetitive failure to eliminate the
elusive “something that... I cannot touch,” the “somewhere — I cannot determine where”
that “defeats” him, leaves him “dissatisﬁed,” and “challenges” him “to further effort”
(88). In much the same manner as Prendick, Moreau is determined to locate this thing

somewhere in the physical structure of the animal, hence his attempt to literally cut it out

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with his surgical knife in order to create “a rational creature of my own” (89). But this
voyeuristic desire to ﬁx the elusive something onto a visible object in order to contain
and remove it is invariably frustrated. “Negoid,” in this case, has a more speciﬁc use for
Moreau than for Prendick: it not only inscribes the foundational excess within the human
subject; additionally, “negoid” establishes an imaginary progess within his process of
endlessly reiterative experimentation and torture, marking, as it does, one stage on the
evolutionary scale that ends, for Moreau, with the purely self-identical (and therefore
fully comprehensible) creature.

If we examine other racial reference points within Moreau, we discover similar,
repeated attempts to ﬁx or locate the foundational excess of the subject through racial
discourse. Thus, when Prendick witrnesses the beast folk at work before learning of
Moreau’s experiment, he is ﬁrst struck by the fact that they are “unnatural,” which leads
him to query of Mongomery, “what race are they?” (3 8-39). When Prendick wonders
about Montgomery’s apparent lack of discomfort in keeping company with the beast folk
after learning that they had once been animals, he reasons that it is similar to
Montgomery’s having become inured to the company of the lower races: “He hardly met
the ﬁnest type of mankind in that seafaring village of Spanish mongels” (95). Prendick
again locates his aversion to the beast folk within a racial hierarchy when he describes
one of Moreau’s creatures as having a “face ovine in expression — like the coarser
Hebrew type” (98). Here the term “type,” as in the previous quote or Moreau’s reference
to “a fair specimen of the negoid type,” places Prendick’s references squarely within the
discourse of racial science, indicating a deﬁnitive essential center of a “race.” Through

examining the similarity of the use of “type” in Moreau and Edward Tylor’s use of the

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term in his inﬂuential textbook, Anthropology, we can better understand how race serves
the ideological function of suture.

We have discussed the way in which Moreau’s scopic desire generates “the Law”
through the reiterated failure to locate and remove the excess that he supposes can be
contained and eliminated through surgery (recall that it is this “bath of pain” that provides
the point of suture within the beast folk’s ritual of interpellation, the recitation of the
Law). Similarly, in Tylor’s text the narrative of social evolution ﬁnds its Lacanian
quilting point, or point de capiton, in the visible evidence provided by the black body.
Tylor, in fact, frames the examination of the “chief points of difference among races” in
order to discover “what a race is” (75) in terms of a problem that his standardized
nanative of historical progess seems, to him, to pose:

History points the great lesson that some races have marched on in civilization

while others have stood still or fallen back, and we should partly look for an

explanation of this in differences of intellectual and moral powers between such
tribes as the native Americans and Africans, and the Old World nations who

overmatch and subdue them. [italics mine] (74)

This oft-repeated problematic of difference within late nineteenth-century social science
is the result of a perceived disjunction within history between “primitive” and “civilized”
societies. This disjunction seems, for Tylor, to require some form of imaginary suture in
order to inscribe it within a continuous evolutionary narrative that will validate colonial
conquest through assigning moral and intellectual priority according to an unbroken
hierarchy of meaning. Here, we witness an attempt to ﬁnd this suture through an appeal

to the material evidence of physiology. As an imaginary suture to a reiteratively posited

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disruption at the heart of colonial historiogaphy, “type” is frequently used to indicate a
statistical average of a race that generally conﬂates mean and mode (such is the case botln
in Tylor’s Anthropology and Galton’s Hereditary Genius, where a numerical average and
likelihood of physical occurrence are assumed to correspond; Galton calls this
combination of the two statistical concepts “the racial center” [xvii]). Tylor’s endeavor
to freeze the play of the signiﬁer by inscribing it within a semiotics of body surfaces
follows a Lacarnian logic of the (missed) encounter with difference: we vvitrness the
attempt to create a phenomena known as “racial character” through sheer numerical
accretion or the obsessive repetition of the impossible instance of difference. We are
therefore not surprised that when Tylor seeks to discover “the general character
belonging to. .. [a] whole race,” the “chief points of difference among races” are
established as legitimate through a repeated appeal to the self-evidence of the
physiological fetishes of Victorian science: hair texture, width of nose, shape of skull,
and color of skin (75). Tylor appeals repetitively to the self-evident nature of racial
semiotics in order to clarify this choiceof features: he remarks, for example, that “it is
best to attend to the simplest cases ﬁrst” by “looking at some uniform and well-marked
race” (79-80), and that the “people whom it is easiest to represent by single portraits are
uncivilized tribes” (79). Not surprisingly, Tylor takes his “most conspicuous example” of
self-evident physiological “difference” to be the “nego” (80). We ﬁnd, then, that the
fetishized physical features which together form a racial “type” serve the same purpose as
the references to racial “types” in Moreau: they become a site of containment for the
slippage of meaning, which, in this case, allows the discourse of race to achieve the effect

of scientiﬁc objectivity. Tylor’s deﬁnition of “difference” requires no explanation, only a

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reiterative appeal to common sense, because it is made self-evidently visible in the
Aﬁ'ican body that provides Tylor with a point de capiton upon which to build his
evolutionary narrative. Tylor’s discussion of racial type, which contains, for instance, an
intricate analysis of various hair textures, provides an exemplary instance of race as a
regime of power under which “progess seems to unfold naturally before the eye as a
series of evolving marks on the body... so that anatomy becomes an allegory of progess
and history... reproduced as a technology of the visible” (McClintock 38).

We can therefore identify a scopic drive similar to that which we ﬁnd in both
Prendick and Moreau as the motivating force within Tylor’s text. Tylor reiteratively
attempts to ﬁx “difference” through an appeal to a visible regime of power, and, in doing
so, provides an irnaginary structure for the encounter with otherness according to the
logic of the stereotype. A stereotype, in this case, should not be understood as an
oversimpliﬁcation of a complex empirical reality that can be abolished or dissipated with
a simple presentation of the “facts.” Rather, a stereotype is a structuring device of racial
discourse that “must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically
constru ” (Bhabha 66). It provides a point of imaginary identiﬁcation in a strictly
Lacanian sense of the term “imaginary”: the stereotype provides a constitutive point of
identiﬁcation for the (in this case, racial) subject. Homi Bhabha takes this location of the
stereotype within the Lacanian imaginary further, closely equating the stereotype with the
scopic drive of the rrnirror stage, as an image that allows the subject to “postulate a series
of equivalences, samenesses, identities between the objects of the surrounding world”
(77). In both Moreau’s and Prendick’s use of the term “negoid,” as in Tylor’s appeal to

the self-evident difference marnifested for all to see in the body of the African, we witness

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the black body functioning as a point of suture for a subjective excess. This point de
capiton gives birth to a scopic drive, which, in Tylor’s case, as in the case of Prendick,
leads to the compilation of a list of physical features. While in the case of Prendick the
increasingly detailed list provides him with very little satisfaction, and his attempt to
capture and freeze meaning and so contain the subjective excess of the beast folk ends
with an appeal to the black body (the “negoid face” of one of the beast folk), we
similarly witrness the racial thing receding before Tylor’s index of the features deﬁnitive
of racial difference. In his attempt to capture this racial thing, Tylor liberally employs
highly detailed illustrations of dark-skinned bodies and faces, as though the excess of the
racial stereotype that seems to recede into the intricacies of language could be caught and
banished through the visible testimony of the black body. In Moreau’s case, the scopic
drive is manifested through the horriﬁc physical violence of his reiterative attempts to
literally cut his creatures open, remove some offending object, and, in doing so, restore
the imaginary unity to his subjects which the object of scopic desire seems to obstruct but
in fact enables. In Tylor’s case, the scopic drive reveals itself in the form of a constant
appeal to the visible through pages of illustrations of Africans, Native Americans, Arabs,
Polynesians, Indians, etc., with occasional pictures of whites for comparative purposes.
Under the shelter of this appeal to the visible, Tylor is able to reaffirm that the “geat
races, black, brown, yellow, white” that have remained unchanged since “far back in the
pre-historic period” (85) nevertheless correspond to stages within a continuous historical
evolution, the “fair whites” representing the latest stage in “the world’s progess” (75).
We must therefore note two important aspects of Tylor’s Anthropology. First,

there is the unspoken but prevalent opposition of written dissemination and visual suture.

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While Moreau is not illustrated, we see a similar opposition foregounded within the
story; Moreau searches for a similar form of visual suture for the messy process of
interpellation in the form of his medical experiments, which represent his absolute
determination to visually locate and remove the racial object that he believes prevents his
creatures from being absolutely transparent to his masterful gaze. The second
noteworthy feature of Tylor’s text is the fact that the need for this suture is articulated in
the form of a historical disjunction between the originary, archaic, or primitive, and
“civilization.” The continual return of this originary disjunction is felt in the form of the
reiterative return of the archaic as a disruptive force within the text that will not be
sublated within Tylor’s schemata of evolutionary history, even though it is the very
condition of the existence of this schemata. Thus, not only does this constitutive
disruption require the constant suturing effect of the illustrations of dark-skinned bodies,
it also ﬁnally relies on this appeal to the visual to mask a glaring contradiction: the races
must be both irreparably separate, formed as permanently distinct in a distant
prehistorical era, and simultaneously each race must represent a successive stage of
evolution. The result is that Tylor’s evolutionary history of the races must be both
smoothly continuous and radically discontinuous, each stage representing an absolute
break with the previous stage, each age incommensurable with that which precedes it.
This dual structure of Tylor’s historiogaphy, is, ﬁnally, attested to by his lingering
fascination with the deviant physical structures of the dark faces and bodies that decorate
his textbook. The dark and mysterious secret that these faces conceal is, on one level, the
hidden performativity of his discourse on racial science, and, on another level, an

ideological mask for the constitutive contradictions of his anthropology. In this case, the

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self-evidence of the racialized body provides an imaginary unity that masks the
performative nature of tum-of-the-century social science. We might therefore observe
the similarity between the role the racialized body serves in Tylor’s text and its use irn
suturing the performative basis of the Law in Moreau. In both cases, “the object of loss
is written across the [racialized] bodies of people” (Bhabha 165).

If we move to Galton’s Hereditary Genius, another foundational text of social
science (one that ﬁnds present-day advocates among those who defend psychometrics),
we observe a dual notion of history similar to that of Tylor. Galton embraces a view of
the evolutionary history of humankind as one of cataclysmic leaps and bounds that ﬁnds
its mythical scenario in the “conquering and ruling race” exterminating and displacing
lesser races (xxiii). Thus, Galton remarks that the “frequency in history with which one
race has supplanted another over wide geographical areas is one of the most striking facts
in the evolution of mankind” (xxiii). This scenario becomes the engine that drives
Galton’s history, in which the existence of the “old and well established races” (xxiv) is
attested to by the “hybrid and unstable result. . . of the fusion of different human races”
(xix), a fusion that invariably results either in the eventual extinction of a weakly hybrid
or an eventual regession toward the “racial center” of one or the other of the races (xvii).
Galton therefore frames a notion of history according to which the progessive conquest
of the various subject races by the superior races drives social evolution. Within Galton’s
schemata of history the result of each conquest is not a hybrid culture or race but the
extermination of one race by the other. There is no substantive gadual change in
Galton’s history of civilization, but a series of events in which totally alien and

incommensurable entities confront each other, one annihilating the other. Galton sees the

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way that “savages... who are brought into contact with advancing colonization. . . perish,
as they invariably do, by contact” as evidence of this process (334). The “races” in this
case are simply carrying out an inevitable series of events that owe their genesis to a
primordial act of creation of the races, prehistorical in the sense that it gives birth to
history. Here we witness Tylor’s primeval races, which both predate history and are the
engine that drives it, carried to an absurd extreme where we once again conﬁ‘ont the logic
of the view that Frederick Douglass so effectively ridiculed. The separation of the races
is due to an immaculate act of creation predating history, and if slavery is merely the
reiterative performance of this primordial act of creation within the “sons of Ham”
argument, colonialism, genocide, and economic exploitation are the reiterative
performance of this act within Galton’s science. We might even argue that Galton’s
science of race is a regession from the more enlightened view of the superstitious
slaveholder. While the slaveholder was at least aware that a necessary / impossible act of
God provided the underpinnings of an imaginary urnity for the social order of slavery,
Galton relies equally on an inexplicable ﬁnal cause to provide the effect of continuity for
his theory without, apparently, being aware of it. As such, the absent ﬁnal cause
circulates in his text as a series of recurring aporias. As is the case in Tylor’s
evolutionary theory, the races in Galton’s account of history must be primordial in their
formation and at the same time represent the progessive stages of historical
development. While the “essence” of each race must be contained in the prehistoric act
of immaculate racial conception, each race must at the same time wait for the act of
violent racial confrontation within history for its meaning to be revealed. In other words,

the evolutionary meaning of this strange holdover of an archaic act of creation remains in

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limbo until it is retroactively determined through a historically disjunctive act of
conﬁontation and conquest. The races must be botln prehistoric and the very stuff of
history; race is both the site of an aboriginal act of creation, predating the birth of history
and meaning, and the result of the process of history working itself out; it is both the
cause and the end result of history. The superﬁcial overlay of an evolutionary
gradualism that is required to distinguish the conquering white race from its primitive
opponents sits uneasily atop this history of absolute breaks, and the two are never, of
course, integated with one another.ll

As we move from Wells’s Moreau through Tylor’s Anthropology and ﬁnally
through Galton’s Hereditary Genius, we witrness in increasingly stark and simplistic form
a foundational disjunction between the performative basis of the modem problematic of
subjectivity and history and the imaginary transmutation and resolution of this
problematic into an evolutionary narrative. While a comparative study of these texts has
tended to emphasize this feature in each of them, it has also provided us with a
structurally sound basis through which to distinguish Wells’s approach to this
problematic through imaginative ﬁction from the social science tracts of Tylor and
Galton. Perhaps the best measure of the distance between Moreau and the two social
science texts is the fashion in which Wells’s text exploits the disruptive power of the
racialized body in a way that is fundamentally antithetical to the pristine Olympian
objectivity that he takes as his target in The Island of Dr. Moreau. If Tylor’s
Anthropology is distinguished by a complacent satisfaction with the appeal to the visible
and the role of the black body within this appeal for the purposes of stabilizing the truth

effects of its discourse, Moreau stands as the uncanny double of such a text, allegorically

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staging the performative subtext of Anthropology and Hereditary Genius. In Moreau,
Wells foregounds the performative basis of society and the subject within society. An
uneasy invocation of the performative element of identity marks the main narrative of
Prendick’s experience on the island, and the inability to resolve this performative tension
is emphasized by the overall narrative structure. As Prendick relates in the concluding
chapter, “unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that
conﬁdence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and
dread I had experienced on the island” (154). Prendick, upon his return to London, tells
us that he remains “haunted” by his “memory of the Law” to such a degee that “I could
not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not... Beast People, animals
half-wrought into the outward image of human souls,” tainted with the “bestial mark”
that, as I have argued, is deﬁnitive of Prendick’s encounters with the beast folk (154). It
seems that within Moreau, this “bestial mark,” this disruptive excess of the subject that
demands the reiterative interpellation of the the beast folk through the performance of the
Law and Moreau’s surgeries in the “house of pain,” cannot be narratively contained by
the vocabulary of race. As Prendick indicates, it spills over ﬁom the island and the
racialized bodies of the beast folk into the center of civilization, the metropolis, where the
Prendick, suffering from the “disease” of “terror,” cannot help but see the “bestial mark”
everywhere, as it becomes deﬁnitive of all of humanity (154). The metropolis does not
provide Prendick with a site of objectivity at the center of the civilized world from which
to analyze his experience as a purely objective observer, but instead immerses Prendick

in another, intensiﬁed version of his horriﬁc experience on the island.

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In underscoring the performative excess of subjectivity in this way, Wells
provides a mythical scenario that not only brings the foundational aporias of subjectivity
and history into high relief, but also, for an attentive reader, shows how these aporias are
resolved into “sciences” according to the imaginary focal point of race. We discover in
the case of Wells, as in that of Conrad, that “race” indicates not an organizing concept or
metaphor for his work, nor an important “fact” or orgarnization of facts with which his
work strives to come to terms, but an absolutely foundational formal element of his
thought. While the terms “concept,” “metaphor,” “fact,” or “organizational hierarchy”
would tend to place race squarely within the symbolic realm of empirical thought, my
contention is that race stands as the foundational, reiterative gesture that creates and
recreates the domain of the symbolic through providing a performative suture and
foundation for this domain. It is as an imaginary suture for the rupture of the real that we
can make sense of the multiple, polymorphous, and paradoxical signiﬁcations of the
black face and body throughout modernist literature. Only through adopting this insight
can we see the functional similarity, for example, between James Wait’s mysterious,
mask-like face, of which “no one could tell... the meaning” (33), and the “negoid” faces
of Moreau’s humanized animals, whose disconcerting deep physicality somehow eludes
deﬁnition and exceeds any observable physical deformity.

As we move through the literature of early British modemism, we will continue to
discover racialized bodies that, like Conrad’s “Nigger,” are both “nothing” and “the pivot
of the [narrative] action” (N. N. xiv). In the spirit of this discovery, we might amend
Conrad’s shrewd disclosure regarding the role of the “Nigger” by combining it with the

observation of one of Conrad’s later characters, Mr. Vladimir, who remarks that the

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“sacrosanct fetish of today is science” (Secret Agent 42). This would yield something

like: “the nothing around which science, the sacrosanct fetish, pivots is the Nigger.”

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The Perfonnativity of Whiteness in Kim

Up to this point of the dissertation, I have consistently argued that race must be
understood as a hegemonic form of imaginary containment for a foundational,
supplementary excess within British colonial discourse. It is, I would argue, racial
discourse throughout the modern period that best exempliﬁes Derrida’s oft-repeated
description of the dialectic of civilization as an economy of death (Dissemination 120).
My discussion of race identiﬁes the unequal and unstable relation between a normative
and regulatory “inside” and an unacknowledged and disavowed “outside” as the
discursive point of origin of colonial ideology. The outside, forming the “negative
resource” for the reproduction of this symbolically constitutive relation, must be
endlessly and reiteratively appropriated in order to maintain the “positive structure” of
the normative inside (Barrett 23). In other words, the proper, normative identity of the
inside is reliant upon the perpetual performance of abjection and exclusion of the outside.
The production of race is a residue of this type of subjectivity, naming the disavowed
performative element of identity that creates racialized bodies as deep physical presences.
If the structuring principle of language and identity is that which Lacan refers to as a
“constitutive lack” and Derrida refers to as “alienation without alienation” (that is, a
foundational absence at the center of the subject that refers to no prior presence), then
colornial ideology at the height of the British empire responds to this originary absence at
the center of the self with racial violence, both discursive and physical (Derrida,
Monolingualism 25). The vertiginous contingency of identity recognized by Lacan and
Derrida is thickly overlaid with the science of race, which provides the symbolic certitude

of historical necessity and self-consistency. The self-assurance provided by the

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imaginary consistency of racial science seems, furthermore, both to increase and become
more tenuous with each act of discursive and physical violence performed on violently
abj ected racial others. The marks on the bodies of certain people that come to designate
the racial outside provide certainty but at the same time create doubt that demands further

acts of violence.

An anatomy of this process is offered in the previous chapter with the discussion
of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Tylor’s Anthropology, and Galton’s Hereditary Genius. In
the third chapter, I argue that late nineteenth-century narratives of social evolution seek
an enabling imaginary unity through an appeal to visual images of black bodies. Both the
ﬁctional Dr. Moreau and the non-ﬁctional doctors, Tylor and Galton, seem to be in a
perpetual state of discovery; they are always on the verge of the realization that their
belief in the evolution of human society is threatened by its own constitutive rupture. All
three doctors meet this threat to the rational consistency of their projects with a persistent
appeal to the visual evidence provided by dark bodies and faces, which in each case
supplies an imaginary visual suture to the discursive rupture that marks the originary
moment of each of their narratives of social evolution. The function of the black body as
a point of identiﬁcation ordering a social scientiﬁc symbolic order interests me in part
because it demonstrates my point that racialized bodies serve the purpose of ideological
suture, and in part because it is a sort of identiﬁcation that underscores the dialectical
counterpart of the imaginary urnity ganted through identiﬁcation with the image. That is,
the recognition of the self in the uniﬁed image is in fact a misrecognition; this imaginary
unity is purchased at the price of an equally primordial alienation, because the subject can

only locate the image of himself within the ﬁeld of the Other’s desire. Thus, while the

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imaginary identiﬁcation with the image within Lacan’s nnirror stage is intimately
connected with images of ideal, uniﬁed being, it must be understood as equally connected
with a primal alienation that is the condition of becoming a subject, the dialectical
counterpart of imaginary unity. If we are to understand the ﬁrnction of the black body
within the discourse of Wells, Tylor, or Galton, we must acknowledge the dialectical
nature of identiﬁcation as a misrecognition that alienates the subject from himself in
ganting him access to his image. Wells provides an exemplary instance of this
primordial split of subjectivity in the interpellative rituals of the beast folk, and, in doing
so, also demonstrates how race functions as a sort of social imaginary within which this
split is contained and disavowed. Kipling provides us with an example of how this
fundamentally ambivalent process of identiﬁcation, the ambivalence of which is
underscored in the colonial setting, can be imaginatively recycled in the service of the
British empire.

In the previous chapter I broaden the scope of the argument by demonstrating that
this logic of race is central to inﬂuential social science texts as well as literary
productions. By showing race to be an imaginary form of containment in the case of the
story of evolution as it is articulated in the social sciences of the late Victorian period, I
attempt to demonstrate an imaginary consistency that illustrates the existence of a
cohesive British racial ideology during the early modernist period. Another step in this
direction will be taken in this chapter, in which I will confu'm the similar role of race in
the writings of two authors who are almost always thought of as politically different
rather than ideologically sirrnilar, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. While surprisingly

little has been written on the role of race in Wells’s writing, a geat deal has been written

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about race in the work of Rudyard Kipling. I would suggest that this disparity is due, at
least in part, to the fact that Kipling so consistently defended the interests of empire in his
writing, while Wells often acted, during the same period, as a defender of the intellectual
left, writing essays and novels that critically question the nature of capitalism and
creating complex fantasies exposing the horriﬁc logic of empire, such as War of the
Worlds. The question, however, remains: why has so little literary criticism addressed
the role of race in Wells’s work, ﬁlled, as it is, with morlocks and beast folk? 1 would
argue that the political division that sets Kipling up as the literary bully-boy of empire
and Wells as the chief literary scion of socialism, while not insigniﬁcant, can obscure the
more historically signiﬁcant ideological continuities within their work. Furthermore, I
believe that a focus on race, not, as I have argued, in terms of a symbolic or rational
schema of difference, but rather as an originary and imaginary form of difference, will
allow us to restore a sense of the remarkable, omnipresent, and therefore historically
signiﬁcant similarity of the thought of Wells and Kipling. In the case of Wells and
Kipling, we must understand the ideological stability of the social imaginary of race
across the political divide of right and left.

Upon exarnirning Kipling’s work, I am repeatedly struck by his understanding
(which is probably alternately unconscious and intuitive and conscious and thematically
developed) of the difﬁculties of maintaining the strict racial and national boundaries that
were so important to the maintenance of British colonial rule. His ubiquitous awareness
of the ﬁagility of the line between colonizer and colonized, Anglo-Indian and native, or
white and black, and the fact that he utilizes this awareness to the end of a greater

political conservatism and a more rigid defense of empire, perhaps accounts at least

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partially for the ambivalent relationship he enjoys with contemporary literary criticism.
Edward Said, for instance, elicits admiration of Kipling’s “affectionate fascination” with
Indian culture and his ability to “get into the skin of others with some sympathy’”2 (144-
45). Yet the focus of his critique of Kim is how Kipling fashions this sympathetic
fascination with Indianness into a tool of British power:
We must read the novel as the realization of a geat cumulative process, which in
the closing years of the nineteenth century is reaching its last major moment
before Indian independence: on the one hand, surveillance and control over India;
on the other, love for and fascinated attention to its every detail. The overlap
between the political hold of the one and the aesthetic and psychological pleasure
of the other is made possible by British imperialism itself; Kipling understood
this... [italics nnine] (Said 161)
Said underscores, in this reading, that in Kim Kipling provides an ideal ﬁctional synthesis
between an aesthetic fascination with the colonized and the paranoid desire for
surveillance of and control over the colonized. In implicating Kipling’s aesthetic values
with the colonial desire for both physical and psychic control over colonized peoples,
Said points to the “troubling, even embarrassing truth” of the complicity between
nineteenth-century aesthetics and colonial rule that culminates in Kipling’s work (161).
While not directly stated, a further implication of Said’s insight is that Kipling’s work
utilizes the highly ambivalent nature of identiﬁcation with the racial other for the
purposes of fortifying empire within the British imagination. Kipling’s work, in this
sense, is exemplary of the interdependence of the desire to occupy the “skin” of the

colonial other, or to enjoy the imaginary uniﬁed being represented by this image, and the

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alienated desire to control and punish the racialized bodies of the colonial other. When
confronted with this dualism within Kipling’s ﬁction, we once again ﬁnd ourselves
working ﬁ'om within the dialectical logic of identiﬁcation, according to which self-
consistency is acquired only at the cost of alienation. What makes Kim so disquieting to
Said, however, is obviously not the mere fact of this dualism in the character of Kim,
which in itself he views as similar to the “paradox of personal identity” found throughout
British ﬁction of the period (he employs Hardy’s Jude the Obscure to illustrate this idea),
but the fact that Kim so neatly and comfortably synthesizes these two opposing aspects:
in immersing himself in Indian culture, Kim simultaneously occupies the space of the
disciplinary, imperial gaze, and the ﬁt between the two is so seamless that there seems to
be no disparity: “The conﬂict between Kim’s colonial service and loyalty to his Indian
companions is unresolved not because Kipling could not face it, but because for Kipling
there was no conﬂict” (Said 146).

I would add to Said’s argument that the apparent lack of conﬂict between the two
sides of Kim’s ambivalent colonial identiﬁcation is due to the effective recycling of this
ambivalence in Kipling’s notion of the pleasure of boyhood play. I ﬁnd this idea implied
but not necessarily explicitly stated in Said’s argument, as when he explains that
Kipling’s inﬂuence on Lord Baden-Powell’s notion of “boyology. .. conﬁrmed this
inventive conjunction of fun and service” as the source of “‘fortifying the wall of
empire’” (Said 138). To clarify, the pleasure that Kim takes in occupying his position of
a British spy in disguise as a native is that it allows him simultaneously to indulge both
aspects of his ambivalent identiﬁcation with Indians: Kim is inhabiting the position of

uniﬁed identity that is promised by the image of the (colonial) other, while

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simultaneously instantiating and policing the symbolic racial boundaries that are
dependent upon the performative production of this imaginary formation. The fact that
Kim “loved the game for its own sake,” which characterizes Kim from our ﬁrst
introduction to him, results from Kim’s habitation of a position that does more than place
him on both sides of the symbolic racial boundary (Kim is both a sahib and a native)
(Kim 51). Additionally, Kim straddles the boundary of imaginary self-fulﬁlhnent and
symbolic alienation that produces and reproduces the pleasure of an unresolved
ambivalence of the process of identiﬁcation. The boyish pleasure of play, which
naturalizes the unique position that Kim occupies, is the pleasure of the performative
reproduction of this ambivalence.

In Kim’s racial masquerade we ﬁnd an obsessive desire to render his Indian
others transparent to his understanding, and it is clearly ﬁ'om this standpoint that
Creighton, the head of both the Ethnological Survey and British Intelligence in India,
ﬁnds Kim both fascinating and useful. When Kim ﬁrst encounters the Lama at the
Lahore museum, his desire for a performative mastery leads him to attach himself to the
Lama:

Kim followed like a shadow. What he had overheard excited him wildly. This

man was entirely new to all his experience, and he meant to investigate further,

precisely as he would have investigated a new building or a strange festival in

Lahore city. The lama was his trove, and he purposed to take possession. Kim’s

mother had been Irish too. (60)

In this striking passage, we should ﬁrst note that Kim’s excitement for the novelty of the

situation follows, rather than precedes, his mimicry of the Tibetan monk: as a shadow

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exactly duplicates the movements of a person, we are invited to imagine Kim’s exact
mimicry of the lama’s movements. It is in his performance that Kim becomes wildly
excited about the “entirely new... experience” that the lama promises. A couple of
sentences later, Kim’s performance is equated to an investigation, a term that is repeated
in the short passage. The fact that Kim wished to know the lama as a “new building” or
“strange festival” also recalls us to the oft-repeated scene of Kim’s clandestine movement
throughout the city: Kim’s “stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes, the crawl
up a waterpipe. .. the headlong ﬂight from housetop to housetop under cover of the hot
dar ” (51). His intimate knowledge of the streets and of otherwise unseen and unknown
passages of the city place him in a position of invisible omniscience: he sees without
being seen, he knows the intimate details of others while they cannot penetrate his ever-
changing disguises. It seems that this is the aim of his investigation of the lama: Kim
seeks to place himself in a position of omniscience and invisibility, the combination of
which will allow him to “take possession” of this eccentric person.

We see the basic outline of the Western order of knowledge represented by
Creighton, ethnologist and spy, present in Kim’s playful desire to take possession of the
lama ﬁ'om the outset of the story, and it is here that we witrness the seamless ﬁt of
knowledge and power in Kipling’s universe: Kim is already rehearsing the relationship
between ethnogaphic knowledge and imperial rule in his childish play and mimicry. In
this sense, the rules of the Great Game appear naturalized as the play of children. Thus,
when Kim meets Creighton, he recognizes that “Here was a man after his own heart — a

tortuous and indirect person playing a hidden game” (165).

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The strange statement that “Kim’s mother had been Irish too,” which is not
contextualized in any way in this passage, most nearly refers to a discussion of Kim’s
Irish father several pages earlier. The startling disconnection of this statement ﬁom all
that both precedes and follows requires a close examination. Critics have often noted that
Kim’s Irish heritage grants him a sort of special status within the ontological order of
race13 : the Irish, at the turn of the century, are still only considered, at best, arnbiguously
white, and their inclusion or exclusion from the category of “white” is always tenuous
and subject to revocation depending on the situation.l4 Thus, it has been reasoned that a
lirninal and shifting racial status is more accessible to Kim because he is Irish. While
there exists signiﬁcant textual evidence within Kim that points towards this conclusion
(such as the strange reference to Kim’s Irish mother in the passage quoted above), the
idea of the Irish as a being that straddles an otherwise rigid colonial racial hierarchy has
caused considerable confusion among critics. Juniper Ellis, for instance, has argued that

In British social order and hierarchy, Kim must remember to hold himself

“lowly,” for his father was one of the poorest of poor whites, as we learn at the

novel’s beginning, and the army ministers immediately identify Kim accordingly.

As the child of an Irish father, Kim’s identity within the British empire is

troubled; he must be recognized as a colonized person who then helps maintain

external colonization. (316)

Ellis makes a salient point in this passage: within British racial hierarchy, being poor and
Irish meant that one’s whiteness was of dubious status and likely to be revoked as a result
of subtle changes in the context of a given situation. One might argue, for example, that

in the scene in which the “blow” of his Russian adversary “waked every unknown Irish

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devil in the boy’s blood,” Kim’s Irishness is downgaded from white to something quite
different, more akin to the primal masculinity attributed to Sikhs and other war-like
primitives in the novel (Kim 291). The difﬁculty of Ellis’s position, in my view, is that
he believes that Kim’s in-between status exposes “the strained work that the novel must
perform in order to represent the White Man’s authority” (320). While something akin to
the tortuous discourse on race present throughout the work of Conrad exists in many
other works by Kipling, this is not the case with Kim, which instead seems representative
of the ﬂexibility of racialism as an ideological device for normalizing English military
and political hegemony. My difﬁculty with Ellis’s position is that he bases it on the
assumption that in Kim whiteness functions as a system of power based on some type of
positive content, and that any ﬁssure or inconsistency in this content points towards a
weakness in the system. This view ultimately underestimates the ideological savvy that
Kipling displays in Kim. This presupposition is perhaps even more apparent in Philip
Holden’s argument that “if we turn to look at Englishness, we ﬁnd only an absence, a
series of prohibitions or restraints,” which indicates Kipling’s “anxiety” regarding the
status of British masculinity (98-99). Again, the problem with this position arises when
one assumes that “ﬁssures” within (racial) ideology cannot indicate anything other than
frailty. In the case of race, ﬁ‘actures or contradictions often indicate just the opposite of
what Ellis and Holden presuppose: a ﬂexibility and adaptability that accounts for the
persistence of racialism as an organizational mechanism of power up until the present
day. What Kim demonstrates is sometlning very different from the panicked and
defensive anxiety over epistemological contradictions that Ellis and Holden presume. In

Kim, we witrness an instance in which anxiety over the stability of white identity becomes

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the basis of intense pleasures that are directed back into the service of the maintenance of
empire.

The constitutive split of racial subjectivity is not, in Kim, a source of horror and
fascination as it frequently is in Conrad’s work. Rather, it is the source of an intense
pleasure that is normalized and naturalized through the ﬁgure of boyhood play. We are
introduced to Kim in the midst of play, as he symbolically knocks a Muslim and a Hindu
boy from a cannon to take possession of it. The next action that Kim performs is that of
attaching himself to the lama inside the Lahore museum of ethnology, in order to
rapturously “investigate” and “take possession” of him (60). If the story begins with
empire as the inspiration for a child’s game (“king-of-the-castle”), it quickly reverses this
equation so that boy’s play is exposed as the motive force behind empire. Empire, in
Kim, relies on an economy of pleasure that ﬁmctions in the following fashion: (1)
Through racial masquerade, Kim extracts an intense pleasure ﬁ'om the instability of racial
identity that is the structurally necessary corollary of rigid racial and ethnic boundaries.
(2) This racial masquerade is utilized, once Kim comes under the inﬂuence of Creighton,
to the end of strengthening and reinforcing rigid racial and ethnic boundaries in the name
of empire. (3) This channeling of pleasure to the end of reinforcing rigid racial
boundaries, the ultimate source of the pleasure of racial masquerade itself, insures that
the pleasure of racial masquerade will be preserved and renewed. The renewal of this
pleasure therefore becomes the renewal of empire itself, and empire becomes self-
sustaining according to this closed economy of pleasure that is naturalized as the play of

boys. Of course I exaggerate (slightly) the smooth functioning of the psychic economy

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of Kim, although Kim does seem predestined to success according to the logic of
Kipling’s narrative.ls
Let us, then, return to the argument that Kim’s unstable racial designation
indicates a profound anxiety over the stability of racial identity at the center of the text.
Kim’s Irishness, evoked so strangely in the passage quoted above and alluded to
frequently throughout the text, is one possible focal point for such a claim. At the end of
the episode in which Kim’s personal Irish devil takes control of him (if only for the
purpose of securing British hegemony), for instance, the omniscient narrator tells us that
the “situation tickled the Irish and Oriental in his soul” (297). Given that “Irish” is
elsewhere equated with being white, as in the irnitial description of Kim at the beginning
of the novel, one could argue that the subject position labeled “Irish” in this text is in
some ways troublesome to racial identity as it is constructed in the novel, as “Irish” can
occupy subject positions on either side of the geat divide between white and “Oriental”
(49). Such an argument, however, would have to operate according to the assumption
that in Kim whiteness is constructed in a way that is challenged by such an inconsistency,
and if we return to a scene mentioned above in which hand-to-hand combat “waked every
unknown Irish devil in the boy’s blood” and allowed the slight and stealthy adolescent
Kim to pummel his adult foe (Babu intervenes to prevent Kim from beating the man to
death), we do not witness any textual anxiety that is not tinged with pleasure (291). Nor
do we experience any of the uncanny effects that we would expect if Kim’s Irishness
were a point of especial fragility within Kipling’s imperialist narrative. Kim’s temporary
reversion into Irish barbarism does not trouble the text in this way because there is no

interior to Kim’s whiteness in the sense of a positive and stable content. To the extent

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that Kim’s Irishness overlaps with his ability to exist simultaneously on both sides of the
racial divide, it does not trouble the text so much as it suggests a way of conceiving
whiteness that thrives on the indeterminacy and contingency of racial boundaries rather
than being threatened by these qualities.

If Kim’s status as “sahib” has any constant meaning throughout the story, it is not
in the sense that he possesses a racial essence. Whiteness, in Kim, does not connote
purity, stability, or permanence of racial identity, although such is the racial ideal that
saturates the social sciences, literature, and popular culture at the time that the novel is
composed. Kim does not strive to attain such an image of ideal being, as does Moreau; if
Kim were seduced by such an image, he would truly be Moreau’s literary counterpart.
We can, on the other hand, best understand the meaning of whiteness in Kim through a
comparison to Moreau: if Moreau is seduced by one half of the dialectic of identity, and
is dangerously fascinated with the image of ideal, self-identical being in a way that is
much more emblematic of the period, Kim revels in the supplementary space created
between image and alienation within this dialectic. For Kim, to be white does not mean
to possess a positive and self-identical racial content that might be exposed as empty; it
implies, rather, immersing oneself simultaneously in the pleasures of the ideal and the
alienation from such an ideal. Kim’s pastiche of racial identities therefore fails to trouble
his whiteness; whiteness, in fact, acts as a set of formal conditions according to which
such a pastiche might be staged. Irishness fails to trouble Kim’s whiteness as an in-
between or hybrid category, as a thing that might create disturbing resonances and, in

doing so, expose the instability of Kim’s white imperial masculirnity, because whiteness

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itself is nothing other than a state of intense pleasure in the perpetual failure of racial
boundaries that turns out to be the same thing as the irnstantiation of racial boundaries.

We might, then, attempt to postulate the coordinates of whiteness in Kim, given
that it does not simply designate an impossible desire to attain an imaginary point of
identiﬁcation or achieve a state of self-sufﬁcient purity, but instead embraces the
production of such a desire through a series of multifarious displacements.

As discussed above, Kim’s prodigious talent of racial mimicry is introduced as an
ability to possess, or take ownership of, that which he copies. Thus, when Kim ﬁrst
encounters the lama, we are told that the “lama was his trove, and he purposed to take
possession” (60). This description of Kim’s mimicry takes on an obvious centrality for
the patchwork identity that Kim constructs as the novel progesses, for we discover that
his education as an undercover agent for the British government is framed in terms of his
ability to take ownership of that which he mimics. Given the interchangeability between
child’s play and the business of empire in the book, it is not surprising that Kim’s
childish desire to “take possession” of tlnings through imitation should become a
paradign for his more advanced racial masquerade once he engages in the Great Game.
Thus, when Kim ﬁrst begins to study the art of disguise under Lurgan Sahib, this stage of
his education begins with a game of counting money. While a Hindu boy easily defeats
Kim in this game, their competition rapidly shifts ﬁ'om a contest of counting money into
one of disguise. In this latter contest Kim easily outshines his opponent:

The Hindu child played this game clumsily. That little mind, keen as an icicle

where tally of j ewels was concerned, could not temper itself to enter another’s

soul; but a demon in Kim woke up and sang with joy as he put on the changing

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dresses, and changed speech and gesture therewith. (207)
(One has to wonder if the demon that possesses Kim in this scene, allowing him to wake
up and sing with joy as he constructs his identity as a process of accumulation, is the Irish
demon that possesses Kim in the ﬁght scene and supposedly troubles the text so much).
We might note that the pleasure Kim draws from racial mimicry is expressed, in this
scene, in terms of the pleasure of monetary exchange; that is, Kim’s acuity in exchanging
one identity for another and the joy he takes in doing so is directly equated to the other
boy’s ability at and pleasure in counting money. We are therefore not surprised that the
determinate ethnic identities that Kim occupies one after the other are named but not
dwelt upon, but instead appear merely as a list, one following another in a process of
addition that never results either in Kim’s successful identiﬁcation with any one of them
or in Kim attaining a sense of the completion of his own identity. Rather, the exercise
ends with Kim being “[c]arried away by enthusiasm” and refusing to let the game come
to an end. The ethnicities that Kim mimics in this scene are presented in this way
because, like the Hindu boy counting money, Kim’s pleasure derives not just from the
sensuous particularities of the identities he assumes, but from the process of exchanging
one for the other in a process of ceaseless accumulation. Kim’s pleasure is that of
exchange, and according to the logic of the passage the determinate ethnic identities are
valued for their apparently limitless exchangeability, which exists entirely apart from
their speciﬁcity. The ethnicities of India become inﬁnitely interchangeable on the basis
of a purely abstract notion of value that does not recognize the particularity of the
identities as relevant. The division of exchange value from any concrete particularity in

this scene rrnirrors Marx’s explanation of the commodity as the central fetish object

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enabling the existence of capitalism: “As use values, commodities are, above all, of
different qualities, but as exchange value they are merely different quantities, and
consequently do not contain an atom of use value” (305). Stated bluntly, Kim is placed
in the position of the capitalist in this scene, and the determinate ethnic identities of India
are his commodities. The pleasure that he takes in mimicry is here shown to be the
pleasure of exchange.

It would therefore seem that this passage invites us to understand Kim’s desire for
possession through mimicry in terms of the “interminable” desire of the capitalist for
surplus value. This recognition gows naturally, I believe, from the consistent emphasis
throughout the story that Kim’s pleasure results not so much from the particularities of
his ethnic disguises as from the performance of mimicry itself. Kim’s seeming
unwillingness to end the game in the scene just discussed or his habit of putting on one
disguise after another for no apparent reason throughout his travels both point to an
inexhaustible desire to accumulate identities. We apprehend that Kim’s open-ended
process of creating an identity for himself through a method of sheer accretion closely
resembles that of Marx’s capitalist, for whom the “repetition or renewal of the act of
selling in order to buy, is [no longer] kept within bounds by... consumption or the
satisfaction of deﬁnite wants” (Marx 332). Similarly, Kim does not seek pleasure
through using any of his cumulative identities for a single, determinate end; it is rather
the endless process of accumulation of an inﬁnitely interchangeable commodity through
racial mimicry that feeds his desire. It is not any particular end that Kim seeks, but rather

the continuation of “the Game.”

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If we accept the argument that Kim’s pleasure is structured like that of capitalist
exchange, we realize that Kim’s own identity is separate ﬁom and incommensurable to
the determinate identities of which he takes possession and which he adds up as coins.
Within the logic of Kim’s mimicry, Kim does not occupy any determinate or embodied
subject position but instead occupies a purely immaterial position that frees him from the
constraints of those who do occupy such a position (all racial others). It is this urnique
position that makes all other identities available to Kim. Such ability to take possession
of multitudinous identities is not, of course, available to Kim’s racialized counterparts.
Recall, for instance, that the Hindu boy who is Kim’s companion during his stay with
Lurgan Sahib “could not temper [his mind]. .. to enter anotlner’s soul” as could Kim
(207). While such minor characters who are explicitly denied the white man’s privileged
access to the “souls” of others are peppered throughout the novel, this point is made most
bluntly and repetitively through the attempts of Kim’s Bengali mentor Hurree Babu to
master English science and literature. While the displacement of meaning that occurs
when the racial other adopts European discourses has often been examined as a source of
profound anxiety - most notably in the work of Horrni Bhabha”, as well as in the
introduction and ﬁrst chapter of this dissertation — in Kim it seems as though this threat to
colonial authority has been effectively neutralized. Kipling accomplishes this feat
through his unique positioning of whiteness in the novel: whiteness does not name the
unstable imaginary ideal, but the series of heterogeneous displacements through which
this ideal emerges. Within this formulation, Babu’s inability to engage effortlessly in the
game of ethnic exchange allows him to be positioned as a clownish counterpart to Kim

without the type of destabilizing textual ambivalence that marks the texts of A Passage to

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India or Heart of Darkness. Babu’s failures, in this regard, are kept constantly before us
through his bungled attempts to quote Shakespeare and Spenser (272), his inability to
observe a Hindu exorcism scientiﬁcally because he is ﬁ'ightened by ghosts and spirits
(222), his unrequited desire for recognition from British scientiﬁc institutions, the
rejection of all of his sociological submissions by The Asiatic Quarterly Review (229),
and his constant mispronunciations and malapropisms. Unsurprisingly, then, the
structurally disembodied position of the capitalist is not only reserved for the principal
white character, but becomes deﬁnitive of racial difference in Kim.

Kim’s own relationship to this economy of racial exchange can only be ﬁgured
negatively within the text, ﬁrst of all through his constant questioning of his own identity,
and his inability to provide any answer to this question once it is opened. Such queries
characteristically begin with a statement but end with a question. Thus, “‘I am a Sahib...
No, I am Kim. This is the geat world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?”’ (166). The
statement that Kim is white becomes the occasion for repetitively posing the question
“who is Kim?” The question, in turn, comes to function as its own end, independent of
any particular answer, as when Kim is able to “throw” himself “into a mazement,” letting
his “mind go ﬁ'ee upon speculation as to what is called personal identity” through
repeating his own name, mantra-like, in the form of a question: “‘Who is Kim — Kim —
Kim?” (233). This structuring of Kim’s identity as an open-ended question is
accompanied by an equally persistent naming of Kim’s identity as white. This naming
takes place both through the narrator (“Where a native would have lain down, Kim’s
white blood set him upon his feet” [94]) and by various characters, most authoritatively

Creighton (“‘thou art a Sahib and the son of a Sahib’” [167]). We notice also, from these

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examples, that the designation of Kim as white tends to take place either on the basis of a
familial inheritance, as when Creighton explains that Kim is white because his father was
white — a formulation that repeats the narrator’s introduction of Kim in the ﬁrst
paragaphs of the novel — or on the basis of Kim’s genetic inheritance, as in the frequent
references to Kim’s “white blood.” In this way, the text performs Kim’s identity through
a reiterative structure of misrecognition: Kim is white, and in nanning him so, the narrator
and the various characters are apparently nanning not a determinate entity, but a type of
failure to ever fully occupy any given subject position that distinguishes Kim ﬁ'om the
natives. If Kim performatively creates his “white” identity at the level of the action of
the story, this same performative structure determines the meaning of whiteness on a
textual level. Whiteness is embraced not simply as an imaginary ideal, but as an
imaginary ideal that exists only by virtue of its own failure.

We see this structure of whiteness expressed simultaneously at the levels of form
and content when Mahbub Ali, another of Kim’s mentors, admonishes Kim regarding the
importance of mastering the speciﬁc logics and linguistic skills to match his disguises.
Ali advises Kim that

“foolish it is to use the wrong word to a stranger; for though the heart may be

clean of offence, how is the stranger to krnow that?. .. Therefore, in one situate as

thou art, it particularly behoves thee to remember this with both kinds of faces.

Among Sahibs, never forgetting thou art a Sahib; among the folk of Hind, always

remembering thou art —” (191)

In this passage, Ali ﬁrst names Kim as white — “thou art a Sahib” — but is then unable to

repeat this formulation. Ali cannot funish the statement that when Kim is “among the folk

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of Hin ” he is one of them. Ali is equally unable to ﬁll in the space that is opened up by
this failure by repeating that Kim is white. Here we see the performance of whiteness
that consistently deﬁnes Kim’s status enacted in the space of a single sentence: the
sentence begins by naming Kim’s identity as white, and ends with an open-ended
questioning of who, exactly, Kim is. The formulation that Kim is Indian fails, but this
failure cannot be corrected by repeating that Kim is white because a subtle displacement
has occurred; by the end of the sentence, to be a Sahib has taken on a different meaning,
has differentiated itself from itself. It seems that to be white is to be different from
oneself, such that the very act of nanning one’s own whiteness — “thou art a Sahib” —
initiates a split, a dialectic of nnisrecognition that can be repeated through a series of such
slippages of meaning but that cannot be resolved. For Kim, to be white is to always be
different ﬁ'om himself. This difference cannot be eliminated, in Ali’s formulation, either
by retreating into a uniﬁed imaginary whiteness or by successﬁrlly and fully identifying
with any of the forms of Indianness that Kim mimics. Whiteness, in this sentence as in
the novel, can be registered only as a linguistic absence, a gap in the text that is
materialized by a dash. Kim’s identity, in other words, cannot be simply stated; it must
instead be registered as an absence or a failure resulting from the attempt to delineate a
racial hierarchy, which is continually displaced in discourse.

Furthermore, we are unsurprised to discover that Kipling ﬁgurally resolves this
dilemma of identity through equating Kim’s position with that of a trader — 6r capitalist —
who proﬁts from exchange. Thus, when Kim realizes that Ali’s attempt to name any
stable and determinate identity on his behalf once again fails, he asks “What am I?”

(191). In response to this query, Ali ﬂounders until he strikes upon the analogy that the

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“matter of creeds is like horseﬂesh. . . there is a proﬁt to be made ﬁ'om all” (191). Witlnin
this formulation, Kim occupies the ﬁgurative space of the one who proﬁts from
horseﬂesh / creeds; it is simultaneously implied that the question of belonging is of no
apparent signiﬁcance for the one who occupies the position of enjoying proﬁt. The
question of determinate identity is immaterial for one like Kim who proﬁts ﬁ'om / enjoys
creeds.

If we understand Kim, the white man in India, as occupying the position of the
capitalist, it is therefore not because he is rich or possesses the economic power reserved
for whites in British India: his lack of material possessions is irrelevant to this claim. The
correspondence is rather a structural one; Kim occupies the same (non)position within the
racial order as the capitalist does within the economic order. In other words, Kim
occupies a position outside of the symbolic order of race that enables this order to come
into being. Another way to state this idea would be to say that any discreet ethnic
identity forms a potential site of identiﬁcation for Kim, or a point of his possible insertion
into the symbolic order of colonial India. Such points of racial identiﬁcation give body to
Kim’s immaterial whiteness which has no existence apart from the determinate identities
that it collects, just as the determinate identities themselves have no existence apart ﬁ‘om
Kim’s disembodied possession of them. If they bring Kim into being as white, he
simultaneously brings them into being as determinate and embodied; that is to say,
without their discursive relationship to the tear in the symbolic fabric that is whiteness,
they would not have their given meaning within the symbolic order of Kipling’s India.
The point of this argument, then, is that Kipling’s most famous ﬁctional presentation of

India envisions whiteness not in terms of an imaginary unitary identity with a positive

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content that might be exposed as hollow and thereby lose its power; rather, whiteness in
Kim is structurally homologous to the immaterial systemic excess driving capitalism. To
be white, as Kim is white, is not to realize a self-uniﬁed ideal of Aryan purity, but to put
oneself in the disembodied position of this systemic excess, and, in doing so, to occupy
the place of enjoyment of the intense pleasure of exchange. Whiteness is therefore not
interchangeable with other racial identities. While dependent upon various sites of racial
identiﬁcation, or stereotypes, for its existence, it is not in itself structured in the same way
as the other racial entities within the racial symbolic order of Kim. And Kipling’s
seemingly deliberate development of this incommensurability between whiteness and all
other racial designations is precisely why racial anxiety can become the engine driving
his racial hierarchy.

Kipling’s famous protagonist therefore embraces a much more durable sort of
identity than Wells’s Moreau. Moreau’s disavowal of the performative ontology of
identity left him to embrace a fragile imaginary absolute; Kim does very much the
opposite, embracing the performative element of his racial identity and, in doing so,
opening the manifold cultures of British India to himself. Kim makes performance the
center of his identity, and, in doing so, is able to exchange one ethnicity for the next as
though they were commodities. If Moreau refuses to acknowledge his position as that of
the obscene obverse of the big Other, eliminating all excess from his creatures and, in
doing so, claiming all enjoyment for himself through sadistic torture, Kim acknowledges
another possibility within the same structural schemata; by identifying not with the
fragile imaginary racial absolute, but with the process of producing this racial ideal, he is

able to recognize that his pleasure is the pleasure of the process of the production of a

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racial imaginary. Kim thereby produces a different narrative logic than Moreau; if we are
unsurprised by Moreau’s guesome death, in which he is literally devoured by the
creatures he has created, we are equally unsurprised by Kim’s successful defense of the
British empire. Unlike the case of Moreau, Kim’s failure does not come with his
inevitable failure to inhabit a static, self-contained ideal; rather, this failure enables Kim’s
success.

We should recognize, on the other hand, that the two novels work through the
same set of paradoxes of identity, and, in doing so, rely on the same racial imaginary to
provide structure to these paradoxes; race, in both texts, functions as an imaginary
containment for the performative element at the center of the speciﬁc paradoxes of the
modern self identiﬁed in each story. The Island of Dr. Moreau contains an extremely
pointed critique of the main character’s view of rationality; Wells provides a strong
narrative focus on Moreau’s blindness to the impossibility of creating a perfectly rational
creature or an ideal and perfectly stable identity, and, in doing so, Wells anatomizes how
Moreau’s insane quest to produce a subject with a perfectly legible identity results in a
brutal campaign of torture directed at his implicitly racialized subjects. In Moreau we are
invited to contemplate the shortcomings of Moreau’s exuberant but narrowly focused
intelligence, and in doing so we ﬁnd that Moreau’s strange quest for purity leads to an
implicitly racial violence as a result of his disavowal of the performativity of identity.
Kim does very much the opposite. While we can understand Moreau’s tragedy in terms
of his disavowal of the performative foundation of identity, Kim embraces this
performativity, but not to the end of any geater liberation from ideological or political

oppression. Rather, Kipling demonstrates the compatibility of such oppression with an

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imaginative identity that enacts the basic attributes of poststructnnral identity in an
aesthetically pleasing fashion. Kim’s identity is forever incomplete and in the process of
becoming; it is open-ended and always in the midst of being refashioned according to the
pure contingencies of circumstance; it thrives on the jouissance of such contingency. Yet
Kim is a British spy in India precisely because he possesses these virtues.

If Moreau’s embrace of a racial ideal is ﬁagile, Kim’s is sturdy, for we are by
now fully aware that Kim’s ability to exist outside determinate racial boundaries does not
indicate that he is subversive of the racial order of Kipling’s British India any more than
the capitalist’s existence subverts Marx’s capitalism. The capitalist occupies an
economic position that is mired in contradiction, but this does not necessarily mean that
the capitalist forms the weak link of capitalism. Rather, the capitalist is in the position of
enjoyment: Marx deﬁnes the very being of the capitalist in terms of his insatiable
systemic desire; he occupies the position of inﬁnite enjoyment. The system of capitalism
does not exist, in Marx’s formulation, apart from this enjoyment. The ﬁrst important
point that can be drawn from Kim is therefore that a site of systemic contradiction or
aporia cannot be adequately understood by the catch-all term “anxiety,” with its
connotations of an invariable fear, frailty, and vulnerability, for the same site is
potentially the location of pleasure, eroticism, and enjoyment. Kim, in occupying such a
position, in straddling racial boundaries within a system of power reliant on their strict
maintenance, is a perfect example of this possibility. Racial anxiety, claimed by the
system of racial hierarchy itself, is recycled in such a way that it sustains the intricate

system of racial boundaries in Kim; as the residue of the dialectic of racial identity,

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anxiety over racial boundaries is normalized, or made to sustain the very system of race
that it violates, through Kipling’s conceptual framework of “boyology.”

A second and related point is that the reductive isolation of the excess that drives
the dialectic of identity leads to the formation of an ideal just as fragile and incapable of
articulating its own conditions of existence as Moreau’s blind embrace of the imaginary
ideal of the perfectly rational creature. Kim’s personality, founded on mimicry, provides
an excellent example of the possibility of an identity founded on systennic excess; he
becomes himself through an on going performance, the logic of his identity being an
open-ended one of pure addition without synthesis. Kim therefore provides a ﬁne
example of a poststructural ideal such as those posited by Deleuze and Guattari or
Casarino, which are discussed at length in chapter two of this dissertation. One point
argued in chapter two that I will now reiterate is that such an ideal, isolated from the
dialectical process that produces it, results in a particular type of critical myopia ﬁom
which poststructuralist criticism often suffers. We notice, ﬁrst of all, the ease with which
this reductive ideal of identity can be accommodated by Kipling’s imperialism. Reading
Kim, one realizes that the exclusive embrace of particularity isolated hour the dialectic of
identity is only made possible by the “prior equalizing of all terms which then allows
them to enter into the most shockingly idiosyncratic permutations”: in other words, the
logic of exchange is the condition of the inﬁnite interchangability of identities, and is
therefore the precondition of the construction of an identity such as Kim’s (Eagleton 36).
Without the invisible backgound of exchange, within which the sensuous particularities
of use value are replaced by an incommensurable system of abstract equivalence (recall

that as commodities, objects “do not contain an atom of use value” [Marx 305]), Kim’s

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pastiche identity would be impossible. Kipling emphasizes this aspect of Kim’s nomadic
construction of self through repeatedly ﬁguring it in terms of monetary exchange: his
ﬁequent characterization of Kim’s enjoyment of racial masquerade through ﬁgures of
monetary exchange serves to underscore the fact that Kim’s identity is modeled on the
abstract equivalence of exchange value. Kipling does not simply assume, as many
contemporary critics do, that such an identity is invariably disruptive of rigid social
hierarchy; instead he recognizes that a being such as Kim is an integral part of even the
most oppressive society. Kim violates the racial norms of British India, and in doing so
provides the necessary supplementarity that these norms require for their own
maintenance. Kipling has anticipated the pastiche of postmodern identity, and
incorporated it into an imaginative system of unparalleled racial oppression.
Furthermore, Kipling’s version of pastiche identity can be given a name: whiteness.
Whiteness is the condition of such a possibility within Kipling’s India. Within Kipling’s
durable formulation of racial hierarchy, then, whiteness is the condition of possibility of
pastiche; within Kipling’s discourse on identity, whiteness is the unspoken backgound of
abstract equivalence that is structurally identical to exchange value in Marx’s discourse
on capitalism; to be white, in Kim, is therefore to occupy the site of enjoyment, a site
systemically equivalent to that of being a capitalist in Capital, Vol. One.

The inability to remark this relationship ﬁequently renders poststructural critiques
of Kim ineffectual, while Said’s critique, which is often implicitly psychoanalytic and
dialectically structured, is much more effective in diagnosing the real problem of imperial
ideology represented in Kim. Thus, while Ellis and Holden believe that they have found

a secret weakness in Kipling’s imperial ideology in the rhetorical complexities of race in

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Kim, Said ﬁnds, in the same sites of textual ambivalence, that “what is never far from the
surface” is “a sense of assertion and domination over all the complexities of Oriental life”
(qtd. in Low 211). And while the poststructuralist approach has the clear beneﬁt of
recognizing race as a formal, textual characteristic of colonial discourse, it has the
signiﬁcant shortcoming of failing to recognize the durability of race as a discursive
feature both between various discourses and disciplines and through large expanses of
historical time: in other words, this approach suffers from the inability to formulate any
concept of ideology or hegemony as a connective tissue between discursive formations
across time and space. This inability frequently renders the interventions of
poststructuralism both discursively and politically ineffectual. Holden, for instance,
connects Kipling’s formulations of race to those being made within the emergent science
of eugenics, but then attempts to isolate this notion of race within a “precise” historical
and discursive context. In doing so, he hopes to underscore “the possibility of evolution
and change” within racial discourse (93). The result would arguably be that Holden
attempts to antiseptically quarantine (to paraphrase Said) early modernist racial discourse
within the historical past, and, in doing so, to artiﬁcially silence resonances with
contemporary racism. It is therefore telling that Holden, to demonstrate the payoff of his
analytic precision, suggests an intellectual connection between policies instituted in
Singapore in the 1980’s to limit the birth rate and early modern eugenics policies in Great
Britain. Without attempting to downplay the importance of eugenicist government policy
throughout the world (especially in former British colonies such as Singapore), it is a
noticeable failure that Holden discovers similarities only at a considerable historical or

geogaphical distance from himself. While evidence of the institutionalization and

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practice of racist policies in contemporary Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and
Australia is so extensive and widespread that it is scarcely possible to know where to
begin drawing examples, Holden does not cite a single example ﬁ'om within the
“Western” world. Pﬁzer’s secret experimentation on Nigerian children testing meningitis
drugs, the extensively documented and notoriously differential treatment of whites and
blacks by the criminal justice systems in Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and
Australia, the involuntary sterilization of hundreds of thousands of black and Native
American women in the United States in the past three decades (the United States easily
surpasses Nazi Germany in this practice”) all evade Holden’s notice. The failure of this
approach to formulate a politically relevant criticism only becomes more glaring when
compared to the numerous literary and cultural analyses which have succeeded in
drawing pointed connections between nineteenth-century formulations of race and
contemporary political, economic, and social practices. Such analyses have been
produced by a diverse goup of thinkers including Terry Eagleton, Anne McClintock,
Slavoj Zizek, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, and Anthony Appiah.

Fredric Jameson, in fact, provides a much more durable and relevant ﬁamework
in The Political Unconscious for interpreting the historical signiﬁcance of Kim’s
patchwork identity. In this work, Jameson argues that literary modernism transforms the
fragnentation of the body and mind that is one of the deﬁnitive characteristics of
moderrnity into a form of “Utopian compensation” for this experience of fragnentation
(236). According to Jameson’s argument, the emphasis on “the semi-autonomy of the
ﬁagnented senses,” in Conrad’s work, in particular, tends to turn “these waste products

of capitalist rationalization” into “a life space in which the opposite and the negation of

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such rationalization can be, at least imaginatively, experienced” (23 6). Without too much
work, we can see a very similar logic at work in Kim. Whiteness, as I have argued, is the
condition of unlimited exchange that enables Kim’s immersion in the sensuous
particularities of each ethnicity of which he takes possession through mimicry. The
enjoyment that Kim extracts from immersing himself in the sensuous particularities of the
various ethnic identities he assumes should be understood as compensation for the
fragnentation inherent in the logic of unlimited exchange that dictates the parameters of
whiteness within the novel. Kim’s rhizomatic identity, always under construction vvitlnin
this Utopian space of sensuous compensation, composed according to the accretive logic
of an open-ended addition of ethnicities without any totalizing synthesis, allows him to
transform the logic of exchange / whiteness into pleasure. The much-remarked narrative
pleasure that Kipling extracts from the sensuous particularity of his descriptions of Indian
life, which has so often been seen as evidence of Kipling’s sympathetic identiﬁcation
with India and Indians, in fact reveals not only the compatibility of aesthetics with
colonial structures of power, but demonstrates how structures of power can be reliant on
the formulation of durable aesthetic values. Simply put, Kim’s racial masquerade is a
form of aesthetic sublimation. In assurrning an identity, Kim elevates this identity to place
of the racial thing — each of the identities that he assumes comes to function as an objet a
— which then becomes a unique occasion for an immersion in the pleasure of the
necessary / impossible structure of identiﬁcation. This aesthetic sublimation provides the
conditions of possibility for the construction of a racial hierarchy as a technology of
colonial domination because the racial masquerade itself is nothing other than the

sublimation of the necessary / impossible conditions of identity dictated by the

154

instantiation of inﬂexible racial boundaries. Without Kim’s mimicry, these boundaries
would be fragile, their violation seemingly inevitable and threatening, and the
contemplation of the possibility of their breach the cause of anxiety and potentially
psychosis. Supported by Kim’s playful mimicry, they are stable because their inevitable
failure is sublimated as the pleasure and excitement of a child-like play. Through the
ceaseless enactment and sublimation of the inevitable failure of these racial boundaries,

racial mimicry sustains them.

155

Conclusion

In the course of this dissertation, I trace a number cf early modernist formulations
of race. Through the examination of writing in econorrnics and the social sciences as well
as ﬁction, I argue that “race” provides an ideologically dominant mode of suturing the
rupture of the real: discourses of race provide an imaginary resolution to the constitutive
limitations of British society in a period marked by the dominance of industrial
capitalism and the overseas expansion of this economic system in the form of
imperialism. In the case of Marx and Conrad, I argue that this society’s constitutive
rupture appears in the form of the commodity, which interpellates bodies with which it
comes into intimate contact as racialized. For Tylor and Galton, I contend that race
conceals the performativity of the discourse on social evolution, which provides a form of
ideology through which colonial conquest is naturalized. Wells’s The Island of Dr.
Moreau, on the other hand, provides a trenchant criticism of the episteme of evolution,
exposing the hidden performativity of this theory both through its thematic development
and its narrative structure, as well as highlighting the role that race plays in providing an
imaginary continuity which sustains this theory. Finally, through an examination of Kim,
I attempt to dissect the manner in which Kipling enlists the hidden performativity
deﬁnitive of national identity during this period in the service of strengthening the British
empire. In the character of Kim, Kipling presents us with a form of whiteness that is
deﬁned through the enjoyment of the performative excess of subjectivity, which contrasts
with the deeply-embodied, determinate, and static identities of Indians. The variety of
meanings that race takes in the texts under examination all have this in common: race

serves as a site of imaginary containment for the paradoxes that result ﬁom the persistent

156

questioning of the conditions of subjectivity and community in the era of early
moderrnism.

To conclude, I think it appropriate to point out the logic of race traced throughout
this dissertation suggests another possibility that is not directly addressed in the
discussion of the previous texts. Although I have tried to suggest the different ways of
regarding the racial other, or distinct ways of positioning oneself in relation to the racial
other within the body of literature under discussion, what I have not directly discussed is
the ﬁnal possibility of transcending the horizon of race. I think it is perhaps
emblematic of the centrality of race to British thought and literature that we cannot ﬁnd
this possibility imagined in anything but a very circuitous route in the writing of Kipling,
Conrad, or Wells. E. M. Forster seems to express the difficulty of thinking outside of the
episteme of racial difference in the conclusion to A Passage to India. Forster, who
dissects the traumatic kernel of race that sustains colonial justice at length, focuses on the
inability of Fielding and Aziz to become friends at the end of the novel:

“Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other [Fielding], holding him
[Aziz] affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.”

But the horses didn’t want it — they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it,
sending up rocks through which riders must pass single ﬁle; the temples, the tank,
the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as
they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in
their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.” (322)

Fielding and Aziz, who are discussing the possibility of the end of British rule in India,

ﬁnd that it is not the end of British rule that is difficult to envision, but the possibility of

157

an Englishman and an Indian relating to each other without the strange division of racial
difference in some way detennirning and limiting this relationship. Just as the Marabar
Caves come to represent that thing which is always lost in inter-cultural communication,
the very earth and sky seem to come alive to keep Fielding and Aziz apart. Once again, it
is not only the temples and the buildings, representing the different empires that have
claimed India as their owrn, that prevent Fielding and Aziz from being friends, but the
horses, the birds, and the rocks, or the earth itself, which seem to thwart their ﬁiendship.
Race is something that divides them and that apparently precedes culture and empire, and
ﬁnally that can be envisioned only in terms of a mysterious natural difference. Forster,
an astute critic of empire, isolates racial difference as the traumatic kernel of cultural
belonging, and the transcendence of racial difference requires something more
fundamental than a change of governments. It seems that the end of the direct rule of the
British empire can be envisioned, but the destruction of the traumatic kernel of colonial
subjectivity cannot.

It is for this reason that we can locate the possibility of something beyond race
only through tortuously indirect routes in the writings of the authors under discussion.
Within this goup, I think that it is Conrad who most closely approaches irnagirning the
end of race in The Secret Agent, a story that centers on an attempt to blow up the
Greenwich Observatory. This “anarachist” plot is envisioned by Mr. Vladimir, an
unscrupulous Russian diplomat who hopes to provoke a reactionary crackdown on radical
political goups, as an attack on the “sacrosanct fetish of today. . . science” (Secret Agent

42). The “bourgeoisie,” Vladimir states,

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believe in some mysterious way science is the source of their material prosperity.

They do. And the absurd ferocity of such a demonstration will affect them more

profoundly than the mangling of a whole street - or theater — ﬁrll of their own

kind. To that last they can always say: “Oh! it’s mere class hate.” But what is

one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible,

inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad? Madness alone is truly

terrifying. .. (43)
The attack on “science” envisioned by Vladimir “must have all the shocking
senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy”; “Any imbecile that has got an income believes in
that [science]. He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow. It is the
sacrosanct fetish” [italics mine] (43).

In these passages the term “fetish” takes on a meaning very nearly equivalent to
its use in other texts we have discussed: it is a mysterious thing that inaugurates a
symbolic order and around which this symbolic order is organized, but which escapes the
very symbolic structure that it establishes. In these passages, “science” therefore takes on
the value of “that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure,
escapes structurality” (Derrida, Writing and Difference 279). Altemately, we might state
that “science” marks the internal limitation of the symbolic order. Because “science”
serves this role within 1890’s English bourgeois ideology, it falls entirely outside the
scope of this ideology to explain an attack on it rationally, or according to the symbolic
order that “science” itself establishes. Such an attack can therefore only be construed as
“madness”: at the end of this passage, Vladimir comments cynically, “I defy the

ingenuity of journalism to persuade their public that any given member of the proletariat

159

can have a personal grievance against astronomy” (44). While class falls squarely within
the explanatory capability of “the bourgeoisie” within Vladimir’s estimation, science by
deﬁnition defies bourgeois rationality: it is the traumatic core of bourgeois ideology, the
destruction of which can only be experienced as “madness.” To destroy it is to destroy
rationality itself. To attack science is to “make a clean sweep of the whole social
creation” (52).

Furthermore, it is signiﬁcant that Vladimir chooses the Greenwich Observatory as
the target of this “purely destructive,” “incomprehensible,” and “absurd” act (43).
Science as “pure mathematics” comes to be represented by nothing other than the
Observatory, which was designated as the site of the prime meridian in 1884 (a date that
coincides with the division of Africa between the European states at the Berlin
Conference), therefore becoming the ofﬁcial center of the world according to a new
universal system of geography that was also a technology of colonial control (44). The
fact that the Observatory functions as the ofﬁcial metropolitan center of the British
empire is not lost on Vladimir, who proclaims that “blowing up the ﬁrst meridian is
bound to raise a howl of execration” (44).

I believe that the attempt “to destroy the imperial metropolitan center at its heart”
described in The Secret Agent represents Conrad’s most direct imagining of the
destruction of the episteme of the British colonial order (Young 2). If, as I argue
throughout this dissertation, the traumatic core of the British colonial symbolic order is
race (which, as I claim in chapter three, also names the ideologically predominant form of
suture for the constitutive contradictions of tum-of-the-century social science), we might

see the attempt to symbolically destroy the colonial episteme described in The Secret

160

Agent as a model for the destruction of race. If the transcendence of the traumatic core of
a cultural order can only be envisioned as a mad act of destruction, in this novel we
witness Conrad’s own imagining of the end of race. Moreover, we might discern in this
act of symbolic destruction a distinct contrast to the logic of transgression staged in Kim.
In Kipling’s novel, we perceive the logic of what Ziiek terms the obscene obverse of the
Law, or “the inherent transgression which sustains the Law” (Fragile Absolute 147).
Kim, through his racial masquerade, reiteratively instantiates racial hierarchy speciﬁcally
by violating it. Kim converts the ambivalence of racial identiﬁcation into a form of
performative pleasure that strengthens, rather than weakens, the colonial apparatus of
surveillance and control. Conrad’s Vladimir, on the other hand, envisions something
very different according to the logic of racial identiﬁcation: he imagines the destruction
of “the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to” the Law (Fragile
Absolute 149). While Kim sustains racial Law through a sort of continual, pleasurable
sacriﬁce to the racial thing (he will, ﬁnally, renounce the Law itself out of dedication to
the traumatic thing that sustains it), Vladimir imagines the destruction of this thing, the
act of striking down the center of symbolic existence which could clear the terrain for a
new set of subjective coordinates.

The end of race, or the traumatic core of the colonial symbolic order, can ﬁnally
be imagined by the most perceptive of the novelists of empire only as an act of self-
destruction. (Moreover, it can only be imagined very obliquely, for it is mediated by the
term “science.”) If race ﬁrnctions, as it does in Anthropology and Hereditary Genius, as a
necessary / impossible primordial cause, or an immaculate, primal act of creation

preceding history only to be ceaselessly reenacted in the unfurling of history, the act that

161

Conrad envisions renounces all ﬁdelity to this primordial cause, and therefore takes on a
radical contingency: it breaks free of the predeterrnination of the primordial cause, and

therefore announces the possibility of something new.

162

Endnotes

1 Watt comments on the role of this document as a transitional piece bridging
nineteenth and twentieth century aesthetic theories in his discussion of literary
“irnpressionism” in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (76—87). Also notable are his
comments on this topic in “Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus” in the
winter, 1974 edition of Novel: A Forum on Fiction (101-15). Jarneson’s analysis of the
language and aesthetics of The Nigger of the Narcissus can be found in the ﬁfth chapter,
entitled “Romance and Reiﬁcation,” of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act (206-80).

2 In his discussion of “sympathetic magic” in The Golden Bough, Frazer divides
magic into two general types, “magic of similarity,” which operates metaphorically, and
“magic of contact,” which operates metonymically (14). Michael Taussig argues that this
division of contact and similarity, which should more properly be understood as different
stages in the same process, is, in fact, an important measure of capitalist alienation in
Marxian terms. According to Taussig, in Marx’s analysis of “commodity fetishism” a
displacement of the “‘social character of men’s labor’ into the commodity, where it is
obliterated ﬁ'om awareness by appearing as an objective character of the commodity
itself,” is, in fact, the “swallowing-up of contact by its copy,” a process that “ensures the
animation” of the copy, or the commodity (22). It is because the sensuous particularity of
real labor relations are obscured by capitalism that the commodity is fetishized, seeming
to be animated by mysterious forces. The idea that the commodity, having absorbed the
law of contact into itself, therefore carries a mysterious power to transform those with

whom it comes into contact, informs my argument on the construction of the racialized

163

body.

3 In this spirit, the 1890 edition of Chambers ’s Encyclopaedia declares that
regarding “religion. . . it may be questioned whether some of the [African] tribes. . . can
be fairly described as having any religion. . . The lowest form of superstition, styled
fetichism, prevails among the uncultivated negro tribes” (52).

4 For Achebe’s argument, see “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness.” While the term “racism” did not exist during Conrad’s lifetime, this is
undoubtedly because “thinking in terms of race was... so widespread. . . during the late
Victorian period that a word like racism, which suggests a negative view of race, was
simply not needed and hence not thought of” (F irchow 4). We should therefore note that
a concept such as “racism” can be retroactively applied in a productive fashion. We
might observe with Balibar, for instance, that Marx encounters a similar problem in
deﬁning capitalism: in order to locate the pre-history of capitalism within the feudal
mode of production, Marx must employ a “genealogical” process of reading feudalism in
terms of the analytical concepts provided by capitalism. Balibar therefore argues that the
pre-existing elements necessary for the genesis of capitalism are reinﬂected within the
synthesis provided by the capitalist mode of production as the effects of the very entity
that they generated (282). Although “racism” is not an important term in my own
analysis, my point is that there is nothing erroneous in Achebe’s assertion that Conrad
was a racist.

5 The continual recurrence of the need to respond to Achebe’s essay in predictable
and repetitive terms suggests that this debate is both a dead end and an evasion of more

important issues. As recently as 2002, J. Hillis Miller joined the debate, with “Should

164

We Read Heart of Darkness?” Miller, in attacking a then twenty-seven year old essay,
repeats a “defense” of Conrad against the charge of racism that is equally old. Miller
argues that Conrad’s use of literary irony isolates him from the charge of racism.
Predictably, Miller also feels the need to present the seemingly contradictory claim that
“it is not surprising” that the novel contains “sexist” and “Eurocentric” views because
such views were part of the historical context within which the novel was written (34).
This two-tiered defense of Conrad, that Conrad merely reﬂects the beliefs of his time and
place, and that his use of irony renders such charges irrelevant in the ﬁrst place, has been
repeated often since the initial publication of Achebe’s essay. See, for instance, C. P.
Sarvan’s “Racism and ‘Heart of Darkness,”’ fu'st published in 1980, or Hunt Hawkins’s
“The Issue of Racism in ‘Heart of Darkness,”’ ﬁrst published in 1982. For other
repetitions of this argument, see Cedric Watts’s “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s
View of Conrad,” or Marcus Ramogale’s “Achebe and Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.”’

I attempt to refute the presupposition behind these arguments (that the formal
qualities of literature are ontologically prior to and therefore isolated from peripheral,
“surface” issues such as racism) in this chapter. A number of claims of this sort have, of
course, been made with a great degree of critical complexity in the past twenty years, but
very few focus on extricating Conrad’s writing from the superﬁcial debate on racism
described above. Important exceptions are Edward Said’s comments on Conrad in
Culture and Imperialism, Susan Andrade’s “Unending the River: Surface Equanimity,
Submerged Ideology,” which focuses on the racial implications of Conrad’s textual
strategies, and Bette London’s “Reading Race and Gender in Conrad’s Dark Continent,”

which focuses on how the textual construction of woman as “lack” is central to Conrad’s

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production of the racialized subject. None of these exceptions, however, focus on
redeﬁning race as a fundamental thematic and linguistic aspect of Conrad’s writing, as I
do in this chapter. While there has been a great deal of psychoanalytic criticism on
Conrad’s work, it has been dominated by Freudian approaches, such as that of Joseph
Dobrinsky’s The Artist in Conrad 's Fiction, and Jungian approaches, such as that of
Frederick Karl’s “Introduction to the Danse Macabre.” Uzoma Esonwanne, in “Race and
Reading: A Study of Psychoanalytic Criticism,” notes that the impact of Lacanian
thought within Conrad criticism has, so far, been “negligible” (202). My approach of
reading the textual production of race in terms of a Lacanian “real” is, I believe, unique.
From a theoretical standpoint, one of the closest readings to my own that I have
encountered is that of J. Hillis Miller, who, relying heavily on a Derridian schemata of
literature as an “endlessly deferred promise of a deﬁnitive revelation that never occurs,”
argues that “Heart of Darkness” is an extended examination of perpetual deferral as a
structure governing narrative (36). Miller, however, believes that this formal purpose is
antiseptically quarantined from a superﬁcial reality like race. The way that his refusal to
acknowledge the issue of race in any substantive manner distorts his argument, is, I
believe, most obvious when he attempts to exonerate Conrad from charges of sexism. In
doing so, he argues that Kurtz’s African mistress, who is represented as possessing an
instinctual knowledge of “fecund and mysterious life,” is quite the opposite of “the
Intended,” who is “invincibly innocent and ignorant” (28). Miller, without any apparent
irony, argues that this representation of the African woman undermines Marlow’s sexist
assertions that women are “out of it.” Miller therefore concludes that judging the novel

to be sexist is all but impossible. Miller’s argument, in this case, proceeds according to

166

the assumption that one of the most antiquated and widespread stereotypes about black
women somehow undermines one of the most antiquated and widespread stereotypes
about white women, as though the two are unrelated, or as though they cancel one
another. This blunder would certainly not have occurred had Miller acknowledged that
race and gender are not only implicated in the very narrative structure of the novel, but
that each is implicated in the concept of the other, as well.

6 Peter F irchow’s Envisioning Africa is a study that opens with a behaviorist
deﬁnition of racism and proceeds to demonstrate the limitations of such a deﬁnition for a
substantive inquiry into the meaning of race. We might note, for instance, F irchow’s
deduction, based on his questionable deﬁnition of “racism,” that Conrad was more racist
in his attitude toward Belgians than Africans (9-10).

7 We might expect this to be the case if Conrad had written a story that took
“civiliz ” and “primitive” societies to be things that actually exist, rather than structural
effects of the evolutionary logic of capitalism. In this case, we would expect Marlow to
discover in primitive culture an unproblematic self-sameness in direct opposition to the
self-divided nature of his civilized existence, as Freud “discovered” that primitives lacked
an unconscious in Totem and Taboo (202). Perhaps Marlow would even run across his
“essence,” or undergo a sexual re-awakening.

8 I discuss the connection between race and gender within Heart of Darkness at
considerable length in chapter one of this dissertation. See pages 41-55. Bette London
has also explored the connection between women posited as “lack” and the construction
of racial ideology in Conrad’s writing in “Reading Race and Gender in Conrad’s Dark

Continent.”

167

9 Perhaps a parallel should be drawn between Abraham’s stubborn persistence in
the face of a nature that seems determined to eliminate him and contemporary beliefs
regarding people of “mixed” ancestry, who were a persistent thorn in the side for
dominant nineteenth-century racial theories. Racial science repeatedly sought to prove
that, like Abraham, those of mixed race were on the verge of extermination at the hands
of natural forces. Mulattos, like the mule after which they were named, were supposed to
mark the boundary between separate species, and therefore not only were they supposed
to be unable to reproduce, but their very existence had to be scientiﬁcally demonstrated
to be fragile. People of mixed European and African ancestry, were, for instance, thought
to be physically weak, prone to insanity, and unable to withstand inhospitable climates.
For an early exposition of this theory that was inﬂuential in both the United States and
England, see Nott, 227-32. For a thorough overview of the inﬂuence of such theories,
see Young, 118-41.

'0 Also omitted was the characterization of the officer who committed the murder.
According to The Log of the Cutty Sark, he “was apparently a despotic character with a
sinister reputation,” a description almost antithetical to Conrad’s portrayal of Leggatt
(Casarino 242).

H The white race is ﬁ'equently distinguished from the primitive races in Galton’s
text by its ability to gradually evolve in order to adapt to higher forms of social
organization. Such, for instance, is clearly the case when Galton argues that through the
“steady riddance of the Bohemian spirit of our race, the artisan part of our population is
slowly becoming bred to its duties, and the primary qualities of the typical modern

British workman are already the very opposite of those of the nomad” (335). The British

168

workman, in other words, is the result of a process of gradual adaptation to change, while
the nomad is mired in stasis. It is on this basis that Galton distinguishes between the
“more stationary forms of society and our own” (351).

‘2 Said’s judgment that Kipling’s portrait of India is sympathetic to the manifold
cultures that are portrayed therein is something of a critical commonplace by the time it is
written. Unlike Said’s analysis, however, previous critical assessments almost invariably
assumed that Kim, for this reason, both attested to the “authenticity” of Kipling’s Indian
experience and redeemed him from charges of being a racist or an imperial toady. Thus,
Phillip Mason refers to Kim as “a series of clearly sketched ﬁgures moving against
brilliant scenes from the India that Kipling remembered” (180), while J. M. S. Tompkins
believes that the novel conﬁrms “the depth of memory and delight from which it was
drawn” (26). More outspoken in this matter is Andrew Rutherford, who believes that
Kim demonstrates Kipling’s “wisdom and humanity” and disproves “nine-tenths of the
charges leveled against the author” (qtd. in Low, 201 ).

’3 See Said 136-44, Ellis 316, and Holden 94. Gail Ching-Liang Low emphasizes,
in a similar fashion, how Kim’s status as “poor white” grants him an ambivalent racial
status (212-13). In a different context, Enda Duffy succinctly states this position: “Given
the relative lack of difference between the Irish and... the English themselves, it was
inevitable that the Irish would be seen to occupy an ambivalent middle ground between
the ‘master’ and ‘dark’ races” (43).

'4 See Omi and Winant 23-25 for a general explanation of the changing nature of

the category of “white” over the past one hundred years. See Brodkin Sacks 55-68 for a

169

more speciﬁc analysis of how speciﬁc ethnic groups have had their racial status upgraded
to “white” during the 20th century.

15 We might note, for instance, that in his ﬁrst meeting with Kim, Creighton, the
ethnologist-spy who maintains control of a sprawling empire with a degree of certitude
that even Sherlock Holmes would envy, gives Kim a piece of advice that serves as both a
maxim for Kim and a lynchpin of the narrative action: “There is no sin so great as
ignorance” (167). Thus when Kim meets his bumbling Russian and French adversaries
with their disdain for Indian culture, there is little doubt that he will triumph: it is clear
that the comically ignorant Russians and French do not have the right stuff to control an
empire.

‘6 In particular, see chapter six, “Signs Take for Wonders: Questions of
Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture.

17 See chapter two Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body, entitled “The Dark
Side of Birth Control,” for an extensive account of the practices of involuntary
sterilization in the United States during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Roberts reports that by
the early 1970’s the rate of women being sterilized under federal programs such as
Medicaid and AFDC equaled the rate reached at the peak of the Nazi sterilization
program in the 1930’s, and that by 1980 the rate the rate had surpassed this number (90-
93). Roberts documents the various ways that women, the large majority of whom were,
of course, black, latina, and Native American, were involuntarily sterilized under these
programs. Federal programs promoting sterilization were effective in sterilizing 25% of

Native American women of child-bearing age by the end of the 1970’s (94-95).

170

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