May 28, 2018 The Nation. 23
of “global openness” she believes London
exemplified in the 1880s. The successors
of the Irish republicans and anarchists who
terrorized cosmopolitan cities in Conrad’s
time, Jasanoff asserts, lurk in “Internet chat
rooms or terrorist cells.” Brexit voters, she
adds, would also have been familiar to Con-
rad as those who “had seen earlier waves
of xenophobia follow from a period of
global openness.” And so Conrad’s “Congo
story,” a “precise and detailed” description
of one among many colonial crimes during
the golden years of free-trade liberalism,
is restored to its traditional function as a
cautionary fable of what might result if lib-
eralism were abandoned. Heart of Darkness,
Jasanoff tells us, “had always been about
more than one specific place”: It conveys the
“universal potential for savagery.”
Writers have long appreciated the role
that Conrad played in creating the moral
imagination of the modern age, including
many of the Latin American writers who,
after his death, began to reinvent the histor-
ical epic as an avant-garde form. As a young
diplomat in Colombo and Rangoon, Pablo
Neruda read Conrad in English “under the
shade of coconut trees,” identifying with
his “strange, exiled and exterminated” cre-
ations. Jorge Luis Borges thought Conrad
the greatest heir to the tradition of desen-
gaño, the ironic skepticism that took hold of
Spanish writers after that first moment of
globalization—the conquest of America—
led them to lose their Christian piety. Borg-
es spun off stories from Conrad’s novels
and identified the Polish-British writer as a
bridge between Cervantes and what would
come to be known as magical realism. Con-
rad, Borges said, purged the “supernatural”
from his stories while making the everyday
“marvelous.” Gabriel García Márquez, too,
shared Conrad’s desengaño—his imagined
Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude
is, after all, destroyed—yet he rejected Con-
rad’s style of self-serving detachment, which
presents history as tragedy to justify itself.
Conrad’s fatalism sharpened his ability
to see through Victorian cant, to understand
the way that terror on the margins will
rebound into the heartland. But fatalism
also allowed him the conceit of impunity.
“I shall never need to be consoled for any
act of my life,” Conrad said, on the cusp
of launching his writing career, sounding
much like The Secret Agent’s Nietzschean
Professor, “because I am strong enough to
judge my conscience instead of being itsslave.” True freedom, Conrad wrote, meant
rejecting the idea that guilt could be expi-
ated through ritualized acts of contrition
and self-implication, which is perhaps why
Conrad refused not only to join the Congo
Reform Association, but also to sign a peti-
tion pleading to spare Casement’s life after
he was found guilty of running guns to Irish
revolutionaries. “A truly tragic personality,”
was how Conrad described him.
“Conrad was rightly skeptical about
imperial promises of progress,” Jasanoff
says, explaining (in an earlier essay) that
her encounter with Congolese poverty
brought her to a “hideous realization:
Measured in relative terms, most people in
Congo were probably better off 100 years
ago.” That realization is left undeveloped.
Is her point that all politics, both against
and in defense of the empire of capital, is
futile? She doesn’t say. But Jasanoff does
identify Mobutu Sese Seko, installed by
Washington, Paris, and Brussels in the
early 1960s as the country’s long-running
Cold War dictator, as “Congo’s modern-
day Kurtz,” without mentioning the role
that Western nations played in turning
him into, as Conrad called his original, “a
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