Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad, Modernism and Post-Colonialism by Gail Fincham Jeremy Hawthorn & Jakob Lothe

Author:Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn & Jakob Lothe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UCT Press
Published: 2015-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Neither here nor there: Global finance in the Belle Époque

Victory’s pronounced visual pessimism can be located within a broader fin de siècle critique and interrogation of the optical faculty and the visual image. Martin Jay has provided a magisterial survey of this prevalent anti-ocular discourse, singling out, in particular, the post-Schopenhauerian philosophies of Nietzsche and Bergson, and the crisis of representation in the figurative arts (Jay, 1994). What one late Victorian commentator described as the

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‘present complete ascendency of sight’, under which ‘the visible has become the real’, was not infrequently denounced from the stand-point of music (J.B.C., 1893: 438; see also Young, 1911), just as Schopenhauer had contrasted the pristine quality of musical utterance with the illusory realm of appearance or Vorstellung (Schopenhauer, 1958). In Conrad’s period, this cultural temper was incited by the advent of photographic technologies and the silent film, and, crucially, by the unprecedented dissemination of visual advertising media in the form of public billboards and placards, shop displays, company branding, magazine adverts and publicity stunts. Stephen Donovan has examined Conrad’s caustic relation to the ‘omnipresence of advertisements in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, and has alerted us to the various places in which the commodity phantasmagoria of advertising is brought into question in his work, whether in the mordant contemplation of a Bovril-like meat-extract in An Anarchist, the sham patent medicines of The Partner, the tumult of pornographic images and sordid wares displayed in Verloc’s shop-window in The Secret Agent, or the grossly misleading play-bills ‘intimating in heavy red capitals “Concerts every night”’ (Conrad, 2004: 30) that placard Schomberg’s hotel in Victory (Donovan, 2005: 13, 112–160).

This extravagant public extension of advertising, in turn, owed less to technological advances than to the current accentuation of the British economy, which after more than three decades of relative industrial decline was now centred on commodity trade and financial markets, the latter sustaining a luxuriant advertising sector of their own. The Belle Époque of the Edwardian period was characterised at once by prodigious rates of overall economic growth, and by stagnant or marginally declining wages within the national economy. The consequence of this was to intensify labour militancy, but also competition among commercial enterprises, these increasingly forced to resort to promotional advertising methods. Notwithstanding, this period was experienced as one of giddy economic boom, largely due to the expedited international flow of British investor capital passing through London’s financial district, and the speculative inflation of the domestic market. Conrad’s insight into the cardinal role played specifically by financial advertisements in this context is signalled, for example, by the exposure of the magnate de Barral in Chance, whose fleeting fortunes are revealed to have been predicated on the ‘power of words’, the slogan of ‘Thrift’ allied to the promise of 10 per cent returns. As Marlow recognises, de Barral simply ‘put on his hat, went out into the street and began advertising’ (Conrad, 2002: 59). In Victory, the magical dimension of wish-fulfilment implicit in financial advertising is underscored in the

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