Benjamin Disraeli, Romantic Orientalist

Extract

Of Edward Said's many passions, Joseph Conrad was among the most persistent. That a Polish-English writer of nineteenth-century colonial fiction should be the hero of the author of Orientalism might challenge those, among both Said's friends and enemies, who misread his work as a condemnation of major Western writers and thinkers who shared their period's Eurocentric prejudice. Said fully recognized Conrad's “uncompromising Eurocentric vision,” yet discovered in it, perhaps paradoxically, a “felt tension between what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it.” With the passage of time, what speaks to us is not Conrad's prejudices, but the way his texts “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints.”