Reverse Imperialism: Invasion Narratives in English Turn-of-the-century Fiction

I In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad famously describes the colonisation of Central Africa as a “fantastic invasion” (Conrad 1995: 44, 58, 95), undertaken by heavily armed but fever-stricken hunters for ivory who are ultimately powerless against the unconquerable wilderness of the Dark Continent. To Conrad’s narrator-protagonist, the jungle and its denizens appear to be awaiting patiently the “passing away” (44, 58) of the incursion, taking “a terrible vengeance” (95) on all those who, like Kurtz, are bold enough to expose themselves to the regressive temptations of savagery. The phrase “fantastic invasion” appears three times throughout the narrative, once in each section, thus indicating the consistency of the theme in Marlow’s travelogue. It is a different invasion story, however, that opens the book. Before Marlow begins his impressionistic account of colonial Africa, he relates a parallel tale set in an earlier time and in a different place. The invaders of this story are the ancient Romans, and the invaded territory is the area now occupied by London. In the anonymous first narrator’s patriotic meditations which precede Marlow’s story, the capital of the British Empire is envisioned as the origin of a “sacred fire” (17) that generations of explorers, traders, and conquerors have carried into the world. Innumerable bearers of the “torch” (17), the first narrator ponders, have disseminated the light of this fire to the four corners of the earth – and all their journeys have started here, on the Thames, the waterway connecting the imperial centre with an ever-growing periphery. In stark contrast, Marlow’s narrative casts London as one of the formerly “dark places of the earth” (18) which owes its current position as an imperial centre to the fact that it once represented the periphery of a powerful empire itself. In what can be described in cinematographic language as a superposition, Conrad projects the image of the Congo onto that of the Thames, transforming the London area of “nineteen hundred years ago” (18) into an historical equivalent of the regions known to contemporary readers as “Darkest Africa.” Marlow evokes a fictitious Roman commander, in whom “the