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The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-mapping of Europe and Empire. By Christopher GoGwilt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. xiii ++ 280 pages. It is fitting that Stanford University, long a center for critical examination of the pedagogical concept of "Western Civilization," should publish Christopher GoGwilt's The Invention of the West, for this book calls into question the reality of our idea of Western culture and attempts to construct a genealogy of the development of that idea. GoGwilt's study joins Edward Said's Orientalism to argue that the division between East and West is an artificial distinction constructed in the last century to privilege the assumed continuity, coherence, and progress of the West and so justify its political and economic domination of non-Western peoples.
Thomas Babington Macauley's comment in his "Minute on Indian Education" (1835), that "a single shelf of a good European library" is worth the whole literature of India and Arabia, flabbergasts the modern reader with its ethnocentric bias. GoGwilt examines Joseph Conrad's idea of the West against the background of historical events which lead from Macauley to Said. How and why does Conrad invent the West within the geography of his fictions? Does Conrad's conception of the West develop or change as time passes? How does Conrad fit into the larger arguments of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Arthur J. Balfour, or Martin Heidegger concerning the Western world?
GoGwilt's study of the concept of the West in Conrad resembles Raymond Williams's method in Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1985). Our vocabulary of keywords defines a body of shared meanings, practices, and institutions which constitute our culture. Certain keywords indicate a turbulance or storm center of unsettled meaning, a locus of cultural friction. Unlike Williams, GoGwilt takes a single author's texts and a single word as his focus. Conrad's fictional landscape often captures the confrontation of "West" with the non-Western: in the Malay territory of the Lingard trilogy and of Lord Jim; in Kurtz's dark venture into Africa; in the shadow of Russia in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Here, where "West" collides with the non-Western, GoGwilt feels there is something deeper than the political cliches of the revived imperialism of the...