Tribal and Economic Exchanges

Abstract

In ‘Heart of Darkness’, the sun was beginning to set on the Empire. In The Secret Agent, its final hour has come. The colonial dream has retreated to the metropolis; the last servants of the colonial adventure are gathering dust in the vast necropolis of Whitehall — like so many mummies wrapped in funereal bands: ‘“Here I am stuck in a litter of paper,” he reflected with unreasonable resentment.’ Litter/letter. With the setting sun, the scribes can now recline on Oriental beds. Space, which was still excentric in ‘Heart of Darkness’, has become homogeneous. In ‘Heart of Darkness’, the Thames and the Congo, in spite of their similarities, were still distinct from each other, separated in time and space by the time it took Marlow to tell his tale. In the privileged domain of paradox, rigorous logic separated the two elements of the comparison, both to prevent exact identification and to allow the comparison to be made, with the result that one image was superimposed on the other and, at times the reader had the impression of seeing double. Just as Rome had not always been the capital of the world, London had once been no more than a remote Roman suburb. Thus excentricity depended upon the conjunction of centres. It was only a matter of time — of centuries, to be exact — before the Congo would come to resemble the Thames. In ‘Heart of Darkness’, the illusion of another place, a somewhere else, outside the known and familiar sphere of things, was necessary in order to make the familiar universe which people thought was expanding seem more visible.