ABSTRACT
The notion of performance, then, is crucial to understanding cultural specificity: Joseph Conrad's Malay fictions express cultural difference through the way his characters 'act out' cultural codes of behaviour. The choice of the Malay Archipelago offered Conrad relatively uncharted literary territory for his narratives, and for his literary 'actors'. The trials of the domestic situation of the Almayer household, the emotional conflicts between family members, the very fact that a central white character is married to a Malay woman and that his daughter is of mixed race are evidence of new roles, and new voices, for non-white characters. Karain's very Malay-ness becomes, in this way, the means by which the narrator reduces him to a cultural stereotype. The heteroglossia that Allan Simmons identifies in Almayer'sFolly articulates irreconcilable cultural conflicts in Conrad's Malay fictions, conflicts that highlight cultural difference at the same time as they are intended to illustrate common passions.
