“‘The East Spoke to Me, but it was in a Western Voice’: Perlocutionary Acts and the Language of Migration in Conrad’s Fiction”

In a recent essay on Conrad’s early career, Richard Ambrosini comments on the first pages of A Personal Record, observing that it “begins with Conrad on board the Adowa, stuck in the harbour at Rouen, starting the tenth chapter of Almayer’s Folly: a Pole writing in English in a French harbour about a Dutchman in Borneo, while waiting for French emigrants for Canada” (Ambrosini 2018, 41). This first image in A Personal Record anticipates the variety of people and places Conrad would later introduce in his fiction; such a variety constantly emerges in his writings through subject-matter, character construction, and language. The multiplicity of perspectives characterized Conrad’s life before being a quality of his fiction, and must thus be acknowledged from an individual and cultural point of view. Few British authors are as cosmopolitan as Conrad, whose life spent travelling made him “[see] the world as a whole” (Sherry 1973, 214). His interest in the exploration of social complexity and ethnical difference derived in part from his experiences in the Congo, Australia, Thailand, and the Malay Archipelago. These journeys allowed him to evaluate racial and cultural diversity from different viewpoints, and also to confront himself with different idioms. The aim of this paper is to analyse Conradian ‘rites of entry’ through the language of some of his ‘transnational characters’, such as the emigrant Yanko Goorall, and the two exiles Karain and Almayer. Their sense of belonging to their homeland as well as their struggle for acceptance in new societies is not only expressed in terms of themes and character construction, but is also evident in their use of language, with the result that a constant breaking down of cultural borders is embedded in their speech, with a direct repercussion on the narrative structure of the stories themselves. Regardless of their origins and landing places, the way these characters speak unveils different attitudes to their condition as outcasts, shedding light on some crucial elements, such as the wish for intercultural contact through communication and, at the same time, the complications and hardships of integration. In terms of aesthetic arrangement and narrative writing, the paper intends to consider the metalinguistic level of the word as “a social phenomenon” and of the novel as “diversity of social speech types [and] individual voices artistically organized” (Bakhtin 2008, 262), showing the different evolutions of the concepts of social exclusion and inclusion conveyed through linguistic exchanges.