A Vain and Floating Appearance

Abstract

Chiefly concerned with the dialogism in Conrad’s East, the previous chapters trace the visual surpluses that both art and history contribute to this imaginary world. This chapter will consider how loopholes in art’s dialogue with history are manifested in the notion of vision itself. Conrad’s fictional ‘surplus’ as a ‘surplus of seeing’ is called into question because vision is itself dialogic and unfinalizable. In his tales, Conrad (1857–1924) himself seems to paint a picture of a world which is elusive to the eye (both the physical eye and the mind’s eye) even to one with ‘excellent eyes’ (V 281) like the rogue Ricardo or to one with penetrating eyes like ‘Red-Eyed Tom’ Lingard: ‘The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression. … The eyes, as if glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness of their gaze’ (TR 9–10). The preoccupation with eyes, eyesight, and vision is evident throughout Conrad’s Eastern oeuvre. The wily statesman of Sambir, ‘that one-eyed malefactor’ (OI 167) Babalatchi, has an ‘observant eye’ (AF 61) and is shrewd enough to know that the eye is easily deceived as he plots to fool the Dutch officials and Almayer into thinking that Dain Maroola has been killed. Having sighted the boat with three men in it, Wang tries to convince Heyst of what he had seen, assuring him that he ‘had good eyes’ (V 225). In Conrad’s dialogic, imaginary East, vision is the fundamental uncertainty and even as history’s visual ‘surplus’ may be disavowed as ‘second-hand impressions’, fiction’s ‘surplus’ is itself ambiguous as Conrad constructs a world which is essentially indistinct and illusory and thus inconclusive.