SOURCE: "Problematic Presence: The Colonial Other in Kipling and Conrad," in The Black Presence in English Literature, edited by David Dabydeen, Manchester University Press, 1985, pp. 154-67.

Serious fiction, as M. M. Bakhtin tells us, dramatises the play of discourses, the competition between different ideologically loaded 'languages' each attempting to set its mark on the world, establish its definitions as authoritative. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Kipling and Conrad were writing some of the most impressive colonial fiction in English, the ethics of imperial expansion was being seriously debated. One issue in the debate was the status of the colonised peoples, the Indians about whom Kipling wrote, the Malays and Africans of Conrad's fiction. Social scientists, liberal humanitarians, missionaries, colonial administrators and planters—each group defined the subject peoples of empire in its own way. But a strong consensus in the west held all peoples of other races to be morally, intellectually and socially inferior to white Europeans, and saw their ostensible inferiority as a justification for domination.

Artists tend to write both within the conventional discourses of their times, and against them. So it is with Kipling and Conrad. Their portraits of other peoples are, to borrow a term from Heart of Darkness, inconclusive: drawn now in the conventional terminology of racist discourses, now in terms that challenge these discourses and the image of the other they prescribe. Conrad's especially, is what Kenneth Burke calls 'a disintegrating art': it 'converts each simplicity into a complexity', 'ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies,' and by so doing 'works corrosively upon . . . expansionist certainties'.¹ Conrad persistently questions the two basic propositions of European racism: the notion that, as Brian Street puts it, 'a particular "character" could be attributed to a whole people . . . a "race" might be gullible, faithful, brave, childlike, savage, bloodthirsty';² and the notion that the races are arranged hierarchically, with the white race, or perhaps the Anglo-Saxon race, at the top. In novel after novel Conrad breaks down the crude dichotomies (white/black, civilised/savage, benevolent/blood-thirsty, mature/childish, hardworking/lazy) of racist discourses, ruins the ready racial hierarchies they underwrite, and so undermines the expansionistic certainties of imperialism. In his stories, written in the 1880s and '90s, Kipling uses many of these same crude dichotomies to defend imperialism, but in Kim (1901) he breaks with convention, offering instead a powerful criticism of racist modes of representation. In both Kipling's Kim and Conrad's Malay novels, we find powerfully persuasive representations of the colonised peoples, representations that identify them neither as innocents nor as demons, but as human beings, complex and difficult, to be approached with sympathy, respect, and caution.

In the much neglected 'Author's Note' to his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), Joseph Conrad describes a project of representation that informs much of his colonial fiction. Europeans, he insists in the 'Note', have the wrong picture of 'strange peoples' and 'far-off countries.' They 'think that in those distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all problems is found in the barrel of a revolver or in the point of an assegai.' But 'it is not so': the 'picture life' in these far-off lands is essentially 'the same picture' as one sees in Europe, equally elaborate and many-sided. And the 'common mortals' who dwell there deserve respect and sympathy. In short, the fashionable European 'verdict of contemptuous dislike' for these peoples 'has nothing to do with justice.'³

The far-off land that Conrad portrays in Almayer's Folly is the Malay Archipelago, the strange peoples Malays and Arabs. In spite of its ringing preface, Almayer's Folly is full of conventionally dismissive descriptions of these peoples: the omniscient narrator makes much of their 'savage nature' (p. 69) and 'half-formed, savage minds' (p. 116), and uses 'civilised' as if the word referred to a radically different and manifestly superior mode of existence. But the story related by the narrator tends to cast doubt on such dismissive characterisations. The novel's protagonist, a Dutch colonialist named Almayer, prides himself on being, as a white, infinitely superior to the Malays among whom he dwells. But the story is about Almayer's folly, and events show him to be intellectually and psychologically weaker than the Malays who oppose him.

Almayer's daughter Nina, whose mother is a Malay, occupies a pivotal position between the two opposed communities. She has been given 'a good glimpse of civilised life' (p. 42) in Singapore and an equally intense exposure to Malay culture in the up-river settlement where Almayer works as a trader. Conrad, having established her divided allegiance and unique authority, uses her to challenge Almayer's claims of superiority. Comparing the two communities, Nina at first fails to sees any difference: 'It seemed to Nina', the narrator reports, that 'whether they traded in brick godowns or on the muddy river bank; whether they reached after much or little; whether they made love under the shadows of the great trees or in the shadow of the cathedral on the Singapore promenade' there was no difference, only 'the same manifestations of love and hate and of sordid greed' (p. 43). If Nina has, as the narrator claims, 'lost the power to discriminate' (p. 43), she has gained the power to recognise essential similarities that Europeans such as the narrator are anxious to overlook. This passage is the first of many in Conrad's fiction that insist on the existence of such similarities and dismiss European claims to all but absolute difference and superiority.

Although Nina can find at first no essential difference between 'civilised' and 'savage' ways of life, she ultimately comes to prefer the latter, and her choice has the force of a judgement against European pretences. Nina's mother, who influences her decision, makes her own articulate case against these pretences. Her bitter accusations, dismissed by the narrator as 'savage ravings' (p. 151), reveal the prejudices of the oppressed as well as those of their oppressors. Whites, she tells Nina, "'speak lies. And they think lies because they despise us that are better than they are, but not so strong'" (p. 151). Racism, Conrad suggests, is not an exclusively white phenomenon; but the distinction between speaking lies and thinking them marks Nina's mother's speech as something more than savage raving, and the narrator, by dismissing it as such, only lends weight in the woman's charges.

Almayer's Folly is something of a literary curiosity: I can think of no other novel in which an omniscient narrator's commentaries are consistently undermined by the actions and observations of characters he disparages. Whether Conrad intended to produce this effect or not, he never produces it again. In the novels that follow Almayer's Folly the narrators distance themselves from the discourses of racism, adopting them, when they adopt them at all, only provisionally.

An Outcast of the Islands (1896) is set like its predecessor in the remote Malayan settlement of Sambir. Once again the action centres on a successful Malay counter-offensive against western domination, and once again Conrad depicts the Malays who lead the campaign as patient, resourceful and determined men. Babalatchi, who plans and directs the campaign against Captain Tom Lingard, the English adventurer who monopolises commercial and political power in Sambir, is richly and respectfully drawn. He has been a pirate, his methods are unscrupulous, but they are also brilliantly effective. When Conrad calls him a 'statesman', then, there may be a slightly ironic inflection to his voice, but the irony is pointed at the western reader, not at Babalatchi. Syed Abdulla, Babalatchi's Arab ally, is even more impressive. Conrad speaks of 'the unswerving piety of his heart and . . . the religious solemnity of his demeanour', of 'his ability, his will—strong to obstinacy—his wisdom beyond his years', and of his 'great family', which with its various successful trading enterprises lies 'like a network over the islands'.⁴ Thus when white characters refer to Asians as 'miserable savages' (p. 126) and boast of their own 'pure and superior descent' (p. 271), the vicious stupidity of racist discourse becomes evident.

Once again in this novel Malay characters offer eloquent and devastating assessments of the white men who rule them. Aissa, a Malay woman courted, compromised and then scorned by Willems, the European 'outcast' of the novel's title, refers repeatedly to Europe as a 'land of lies and evil from which nothing but misfortune ever comes to us—who are not white' (p. 144). Babalatchi's rejoinders to Captain Lingard are even more corrosive of European certainties. Lingard, defending his domination of Sambir, asserts that if he ever spoke to its nominal Malay ruler 'like an elder brother, it was for your good—for the good of all'. 'This is a white man's talk', responds Babalatchi, 'with bitter exultation',

I know you. That is how you all talk while you load your guns and sharpen your swords; and when you are ready, then to those who are weak, you say: 'Obey me and be happy, or die!' You are strange, you white men. You think it is only your wisdom and your virtue and your happiness that are true. (p. 226)

Babalatchi's searing indictment of European hypocrisy and ethno-centricism is corroborated in a number of ways. The narrator makes it clear, for instance, that Europeans do feel racial antipathy and that the sources of this feeling are irrational. Thus when Willems dreams of escaping from Sambir, his desire is attributed to 'the flood of hate, disgust, and contempt of a white man for that blood which is not his blood, for that race that is not his race' (p. 152). This flood of feeling, which overmasters Willems' 'reason', resembles the 'feeling of condemnation' that overcomes Lingard when he imagines Willems' illicit relation with Aissa. And this reaction, too, is described as 'illogical'. It is an 'accursed feeling made up of disdain, of anger, and of the sense of superior virtue that leaves us deaf, blind, contemptuous and stupid before anything which is not like ourselves' (p. 254).

If Conrad challenges the European representation of Malays as uniformly savage and inferior, he does not do so in order to replace that representation with an idyllic one. Babalatchi and his comrades, Lakamba and Omar, are Malay adventurers, blood-thirsty, lawless men who consider 'throat cutting, kidnapping, slave-dealing' to be 'manly pursuits' (p. 52). The peace Lingard enforces seems in many ways preferable to the anarchy they admire. But Lingard's peace is also a kind of tyranny, and Adulla's ascension to power seems to restore some degree of freedom without destroying that peace. In the end, then, Conrad suggests that any generalised ennoblement of one race or another is as inappropriate as generalised dismissal: there are certainly differences of custom and belief between cultures, but the most important differences cut across racial lines and render racial affiliation meaningless as an indicator of intelligence, character, or virtue.

This same line of argument is developed in Lord Jim (1900),⁵ which explores, among other things, the relation between a Malay community and its genuinely popular English ruler. When Jim, another European outcast, arrives in Patusan, another upriver settlement in the Malay Archipelago, three local factions are struggling for dominance: Rajah Allang's local Malays, Doramin's party of Malay settlers from Celebes, and Sherif Ali's forces, drawn from the tribes of the interior. Ambitious and utterly reckless, Jim quickly earns a reputation for valour, allies himself with Doramin's faction, and engineers a military victory over Sherif Ali so dramatic that no second campaign is necessary. By this means he becomes the actual ruler of Patusan, and a widely admired ruler. As a white, a member of the race which has conquered the Archipelago, he is automatically feared and, however grudgingly, respected by the Malays. As a fearless warrior, a successful military leader, a peace-maker, and an evenhanded governor, he is widely venerated. Conrad describes Jim's triumph, then, in a manner that makes the Malays' acquiescence and approval seem reasonable, a sign not of innate inferiority but of a reasonable reaction to a complex situation. If a 'Jim-myth' (p. 171) arises, it does so because Jim has saved the community from the bloody deadlock of factional strife, in which 'utter insecurity for life and property was the normal condition' (p. 139).

But Conrad, having exposed the logic of colonial acquiescence, goes on to elucidate the logic of rebellion. Like Lingard in An Outcast of the Islands, Jim proclaims his unqualified dedication to the Malay community he rules: 'He declared . . . that their welfare was his welfare, their losses his losses, their mourning his mourning' (p. 238). And once again, Conrad tests and refutes this claim to absolute identification. Jim, for reasons that include a misguided sense of racial allegiance, refuses to lead a necessary campaign against piratical white intruders, and these intruders, set free, slaughter a company of Malay warriors, including Doramin's noble son. Conrad's point here, as in An Outcast of the Islands, is clear: even the most well-intentioned white ruler will experience a conflict of cultural interests, will be torn between allegiance to his native European community and allegiance to the community he rules. And the resolution of that conflict will be at the expense of his subjects, will justify, ultimately, their resistance to his continued domination.

Conrad makes this point once again in Heart of Darkness (1902), but in a most unfortunate way. For here it is the European novelist, Conrad himself, who succumbs to the interests of his own community and betrays his colonial subjects, the Africans he 'represents'. Speaking through Marlow, Conrad identifies the Africans, not consistently but emphatically, as demons and fiends, insists that 'the picture of life' in the Congo forests is appallingly different from the picture in Europe.

In the early stages of Marlow's narrative, the familiar invitations to sympathetic identification with the colonised are still in play. The Congolese are described as victims of a particularly brutal imperialism, compared favourably to their European masters, depicted in ways that stress their kinship with other men. Noting that the villages along the trail to the Central Station are deserted, Marlow remarks, 'Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon'.⁶ And he suggests that African drumming, 'a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild', may have for Africans 'as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country' (p. 20). This is identification with a vengeance.

But as Marlow recounts his voyage up the river to Kurtz at the Inner Station, these familiarising comparisons cease and the emphasis falls more and more emphatically on the savage otherness of the Congolese. Their speech is described as a 'fiendish row' (p. 37) and they are no longer represented as individuals, but rather as 'a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling' (p. 36). When the idea of kinship is suggested, it is with horror: 'No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman' (p. 36).

The last images of the Congolese are the most thoroughly distancing: 'Deep within the forest, red gleams partially illuminate many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation' (p. 65) and 'a black figure', a 'sorcerer' with 'horns—antelope horns, I think—on its head' (p. 66). This nightmare vision of 'horned shapes' and the equation of the Congolese with a 'conquering darkness' (p. 75) haunt Marlow long after his return to Europe, and they seem intended to haunt the reader as well.

One could attribute the difference between Conrad's representation of the colonised peoples in the Malay novels and his treatment of them in Heart of Darkness to social and biographical factors. The Congo basin, ravaged by centuries of slaving, was undoubtedly horrific, and Conrad seems to have had little opportunity, while he was there, to familiarise himself with the Congolese. Certainly Marlow does not: he insists on more than one occasion that he could not get a clear picture of the Africans, the kind of picture, in other words, that might have enabled him to do justice to them as fellow mortals.

But if Conrad cooperates in the familiar misrepresentation of Africans as demonic others, he does.so too, I think, because his commitment to accurate representation comes into conflict with another commitment. The nature of that commitment, which has only recently been recognised by Conrad critics,⁷ is best brought out in two passages, one from the manuscript of Heart of Darkness, the other from the novel itself. The first has to do with events on board the yacht 'Nellie', where Marlow tells his tale. Just before Marlow begins, the frame narrator recalls,

A big steamer came down all a long blaze of lights like a town viewed from the sea bound to the uttermost ends of the earth and timed to the day, to the very hour with nothing unknown in her path, no mystery on her way, nothing but a few coaling stations. She went fullspeed, noisily, an angry commotion of the waters followed her . . . And the earth suddenly seemed shrunk to the size of a pea spinning in the heart of an immense darkness. (p. 7n.)

The steamer makes a perfect figure of the forces of rationalisation: of science, industrial technology, planning and regimentation. And its voyage offers a powerful image of the consequences of these forces. The ship produces, by its precisely calculated passage to the very ends of the earth, the effect that Max Weber called 'disenchantment': it erases from the world, or from the narrator's imagination of the world, all sense of 'mystery' and wonder, leaves it barren and diminished. Marlow's story, which follows immediately, seems designed as an antidote to this diminution, his steamboat voyage as a counterthrust which reconstitutes, or reenchants, the world shrunk by the steamer. The conclusion of the novel signals the success of this project: looking down the Thames, the frame narrator now remarks that the river 'seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness' (p. 79).

By deleting the description of the steamer from the published version of Heart of Darkness, Conrad partially obscures this aspect of his fictional design. But some sense of what he is up to is conveyed by a fascinating passage early in the novel. Reminiscing about his childhood passion for maps, Marlow remembers that 'at that time there were many blank spaces on the earth'. Africa was one, 'a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over' (p. 8). By the time he had grown up, Marlow continues, most such spaces had been filled in, but a sense of the unknown still hung over the upper Congo; it was still not quite charted: still a place of enchantment.

Marlow goes up the river, then, in part because he is dedicated to enchantment, drawn to a world radically different from the world of everyday, predictable familiarity. But this attraction, this need for mystery (which grew ever stronger in Europe as the domain of technological rationalisation expanded) impelís Marlow to make something of the Africans that is quite inconsistent with Conrad's project of familiarisation. To preserve a domain of enchantment for himself and his European readers, Conrad has Marlow write 'zone of the demonic' across the 'blank space' of Africa, thus consigning the Africans to a familiar role as demonic others. He sacrifices their needs for adequate representation to his own need for mystery. That Marlow also writes 'zone of the human' across Africa is indisputable, but he does so in fainter script, and by the end of Heart of Darkness this script is all but illegible.

Heart of Darkness, then, offers a cruel corroboration of Conrad's warning that no European can be trusted to represent the colonised. Torn between his dedication to accurate and sympathetic representation and his need to affirm the existence of radical moral and epistemological darkness, Conrad makes his African characters bear the burden of that darkness and thus perpetuates identifications that justify European contempt and domination. It is a shame that his most widely read novel should contain his most pejorative representations of the colonised, but a consolation that it offers as well perhaps the most powerful indictment of imperial exploitation in English.

In their time, Kipling and Conrad were frequently compared, but from the distance of some eighty years the differences between their works are more apparent than the similarities. Conrad wrote about the raw edges of empire, Kipling about its great heart. Conrad's fiction is aesthetically ambitious, psychologically oriented, politically sceptical; Kipling's is more conventional, less interested in innerness, and basically affirmative in its treatment of imperial rule. It is not, in other words, a 'disintegrating' art: it sets out to celebrate and defend certain established positions, rather than to work corrosively on them. For the most part the certainties defended are those of imperial ideology. When Kipling criticises the crudest European representations of Indians, he does so on the basis of more sophisticated racist beliefs that still sustain white superiority and right to rule. But Kipling, like Conrad, is inconsistent. In Kim, his greatest Indian work, he celebrates a set of certainties that have nothing to do with race, certainties which in fact are directly antagonistic to all doctrines of racial superiority. The reversal becomes apparent when one approaches Kim by way of the two decades of stories that precede it.

In 'The Head of the District' (1890), a dying English official, ruler of a frontier district, addresses the Afghan tribesmen he has subdued:

Men, I'm dying . . . but you must be good men when I am not here. . . . Tallantire Sahib will be with you, but I do not know who takes my place. I speak now true talk, for I am as it were already dead, my children—for though ye be strong men, ye are children.

'And thou art our father and our mother',⁸ the Afghan chief replies, apparently satisfied with what Conrad's Babalatchi would have quickly dismissed as 'white man's talk'. But this consensus for dependency is threatened when a Bengali is sent to rule the district. The appointment is interpreted as an insult by the Afghans, who have consented to be ruled by the militarily superior English, but despise Bengalis as weaklings (here, as elsewhere in the stories, Kipling makes much of communal rivalries in India, and mocks the claims of western-educated Bengalis to be ready for posts of responsibility in the Indian Civil Service). 'Dogs you are', a fanatical blind Mullah declares to the Afghans, 'because you listened to Orde Sahib and called him father and behaved as his children' (p. 180). But the Mullah's rebellion, unlike that sponsored by Babalatchi in An Outcast of the Islands, fails miserably and is morally, as well as pragmatically, discredited. In the end, after the Mullah has been killed and the unmanly Bengali has fled, the same tribal chief is shown listening, and assenting, to the same paternalistic and racist rhetoric: 'Get hence to the hills—go and wait there, starving, till it shall please the Government to call thy people out for punishment—children and fools that ye be!' (p. 203). The ready hierarchy of imperial domination is thus reconfirmed; the challenge, which is Conrad's work would be authentic and would remain unanswered, is only a pretext for its dramatic re-affirmation.

Indian dependency is affirmed in a different manner in 'His chance in life' (1887), the story of Michele D'Cruze, a young telegraph operator 'with seven-eighths native blood'.⁹ A riot breaks out in the town where D'Cruze is posted while the English administrator is away. (Kipling pauses at this point in the story for a cautionary admonition to his audience: 'Never forget that unless the outward and visible signs of Our Authority are always before a native he is as incapable as a child of understanding what authority means' (p. 88).) The Indian police inspector, 'afraid, but obeying the old race instinct which recognizes a drop of White blood as far as it can be diluted' (p. 89), defers to D'Cruze, who astonishes everyone, including himself, by taking charge and putting down the rioters. When an English administrator appears, however, D'Cruze feels 'himself slipping back more and more into the native . . . It was the White drop in Michele's veins dying out, though he did not know it' (p. 91). Once again, the contrast to Conrad is instructive: while Conrad uses characters of 'mixed blood' to challenge European claims to superiority, Kipling finds in one such character a pretext for parading racist notions of the distribution of the faculty of rule: responsibility.

A third story, 'The enlightenment of Pagett, M.P.' (1890), shows Kipling working again to make a case for English domination of India. The MP of the story's title is a liberal who has come out to study (and embrace) the National Congress movement, newly founded in 1885. Congress, the organisation that eventually brought independence to India, represented the newly emerging Indian community of western-educated and oriented professionals, men who believed, often correctly, that they were being denied positions in government because of their race. It was only one of a number of nationalist and reform-minded organisations that sprang up in India in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

But in 'Pagett', Kipling writes as if Congress were an isolated and idiotic institution. Pagett, visiting an old school friend now in the Indian civil service, is 'enlightened' by a series of Indian, British and American witnesses who appear on business and testify enthusiastically against Congress. Some of their criticisms seem plausible, but by no means all of them. And the onesideness of the testimony ultimately betrays the partiality of the whole proceeding: Kipling's unwillingness to let the Congress position be heard at all. Significantly, the only witness to defend Congress, an organisation which numbered among its members numerous well-educated Indians and Englishmen, is a callow school boy, enthusiastic but ill-informed, who impresses even the sympathetic Pagett unfavourably.

The other witnesses testify not only against Congress but to the innumerable failings of the Indian people: their religious and racial hatreds, caste exclusiveness, political indifference, corruption, sexism and 'utter indifference to all human suffering'.¹⁰ These disabilities, Kipling suggests, make any talk of equality or of elections mere madness. And they are ineradicable, a kind of racial fatality, 'eternal and inextinguishable' (p. 354).

The racist rhetoric of these three stories, with their stereotypic characterisations, their talk of 'blood', their designation of Indians as 'children', their rejection of all claims to equality, and their refusal to enter into serious dialogue, is typical of Kipling's short fiction in general, the scores of short stories he turned out in the eighties and early nineties. There are impressive Indian characters in a few of these stories, and occasional criticisms of the most brutally dismissive forms of racism. But the good Indians are all also good servants of the raj, and Kipling's own attitude substitutes paternal condescension for contempt. He represents the subject peoples from within the discourse of dependency, the paternalistic rhetoric of racist societies from the American South to the Gangetic Plain.¹¹

Something of this tone of condescension lingers in Kim. Once again, the positively portrayed Indian characters are all loyal servants of the raj; Congress and the forces it represented seem to have disappeared altogether from the Indian scene. But in Kim there is none of the insistence on racial difference and English superiority that we find in so many of the stories. Indeed, in this single work Kipling presses as hard against racist modes of perception and representation as Conrad ever does.

Thus the Church of England chaplain who views the authentically holy lama 'with the triple ringed uninterest of the creed that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the title of "heathen"'¹² is depicted as a fool. And so, too, is the young English soldier who calls 'all natives "niggers"' (p. 108) and doesn't know a word of any Indian language. Kipling, who in his stories routinely casts Bengalis as cowardly weaklings, now presents a Bengali secret agent whose feats of courage and endurance 'would astonish folk who mock at his race' (p. 268).

The novel not only repudiates racist modes of characterisation, it dramatises this repudiation. Character after character—the Sahiba, Huree Babu Mokerjee, the Woman of Shamlegh—overcomes his or her racial prejudices. Even Mahbub Ali, the roguish Pathan horse trader and spy, grows more tolerant as he develops, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes has pointed out, 'away from the Pathan . . . whose opening words were always "God's curse on all unbelievers" . . . towards the Lama's tolerance, [learns] to stop himself with an effort from using his instinctive curse on the "other".'¹³ If Kim, 'The Little Friend of All the World' (p. 23), is in one sense the catalyst of all this coming together, he also participates in it, shedding his own prejudices and sense of racial superiority. Throughout the novel, then, Kipling repudiates the hierarchical constructs of racist thinking. What is taken for granted in the earlier fiction is taken down in Kim.

Kipling is dreaming, of course, to imagine that the kind of interracial co-operation and comradeship he portrays in Kim could take root and grow under British imperial rule: this is E. M. Forster's point in A Passage to India. But by blinding himself in this one respect, Kipling is able to see beyond the horizon of his times and portray a world of yet to be realised interracial harmony. For this reason, Kim may well be a more effective antidote to racial antipathies than any of Conrad's works which by their great gloominess tend to corrode at once any belief in racist modes of vision and any hope that they may be abolished.

¹Kenneth Burke: Counter-Statement (1931; Reprinted Berkeley, California, 1968), p. 105.

² B. V. Street: The Savage in Literature (London, 1975), p. 7.

³ Joseph Conrad: Almayer's Folly (1895; reprinted New York, 1923), pp. ix-x. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

⁴ Joseph Conrad: An Outcast of the Islands (1896; reprinted New York, 1926), pp. 109-10. Subsequent references to this essay will appear in the text.

⁵ Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim (1900; reprinted New York, 1968). Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

⁶ Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1902; reprinted New York, 1963), p. 20. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

⁷ See Allon White: The Uses of Obscurity (London, 1981) and Jacques Darras: Joseph Conrad and the West (London, 1982).

⁸ Rudyard Kipling: 'The Head of the District', in In Black and White (1895; reprinted New York, 1898), p. 172. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

⁹ Rudyard Kipling: 'His chance in life', in Plain Tales From the Hills (1888; reprinted New York, 1898), p. 86. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

¹⁰ Rudyard Kipling: 'The enlightenments of Pagett, M.P.', in In Black and White, p. 383. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

¹¹ 'There is no originality in Kipling's rudeness to us', wrote Nirad C. Chaudhiri, 'but only a repetition, in the forthright Kiplingian manner, of what was being said in every mess and club.' Nirad C. Chaudhiri: 'The finest story about India—in English', in Encounter, VII (April 1957), p. 47.

¹² Rudyard Kipling: Kim (1901; reprinted New York, 1959), p. 90. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

¹³ Mark Kinkead-Weekes: 'Vision in Kipling's novels', in Kipling's Mind and Art, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Stanford, California, 1964), p. 225. For further discussion of Kipling's change of attitude in Kim, see K. Bhaskara Rao: Rudyard Kipling's India (Norman, Oklahoma, 1967).