‘TWO hundred and fifty years ago, or as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day . . .’ said King Charles in one of the many passages of a speech to the United States Congress that brought a healthy quota of insight and humour into a venue renowned for its foppery, friction, and fatuous frenzy.
The quip, greeted with approval by the packed audience, instantly reminded me of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in particular the soliloquy of another Charles – Marlow in this case – at the beginning of the novel: ‘I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago – the other day.’
Marlow then unfolds a splendid sequence that moves any reader with a modicum of sensitivity to the core. ‘But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feeling of a commander of a fine – what d’ye call them? – trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north . . . Imagine him here – the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina – and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like.’ He glides along aboard the Nellie, a cruising yawl at rest on the sea-reach of the Thames.
What follows in Heart of Darkness is not merely a recollection but a quiet unmasking: the suggestion that time, so easily compressed into a witticism, does not dissolve what it contains. Marlow’s ‘other day’ is not a joke but a warning. The Romans, those bearers of order and civilisation, arrive not as a distant memory embalmed in textbooks, but as a living presence – agents of an enterprise that, seen from the edge of the world, looks suspiciously like conquest dressed in the language of necessity. Marlow himself sharpens the image:
‘Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages – precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay – cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death – death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here.’
‘The other day’ can be read as a reminder that civilisation, for all its polish and glitter, is never more than a thin varnish liable to crack at the slightest pressure, even in societies that consider themselves its most accomplished custodians.
And so the Thames, serene and familiar, is suddenly made to mirror the Congo: not a boundary between light and darkness, but a continuum. The empire that flatters itself as enlightened is revealed to have sprung from the same obscure impulses it prefers to locate elsewhere. In that sense, Marlow does not travel into darkness; he merely recognises it.
It is precisely this unsettling contraction of time – this startling compression of centuries into ‘the other day’ – that gives both passages their peculiar force. When King Charles echoes the phrase before Congress, the effect is lighter, even charming. Yet the resonance lingers. For beneath the levity lies the same quiet proposition: that history is never quite past, that the foundations upon which nations congratulate themselves are closer, more immediate, and perhaps more ambiguous than ceremony would suggest.
Some observers dismissed the King’s speech to Congress as historical fiction, even out of touch. I will not dispute the charge; I simply fail to grasp it. Be it as it may, when the King invoked the cornerstone slogan of the 1776 rebellion – ‘No taxation without representation’ – many in attendance looked elsewhere, as though an untimely distraction had intervened. One does not care to be reminded, least of all by a foreign voice, of truths already too well known, especially by taxpayers.
As for the alleged piece of fiction that the monarch presumably delivered – who could even care if that were the case? Who in their right mind would ask the King for transparency when magic is offered? Who would trade poetry for prose, or demand dull facts when fantasy will do – the very fabric of which dreams are made? Digressions aside, it was one of the most sublime pieces of oratory delivered by a high-profile British statesman since the days of Winston Churchill – or Enoch Powell, for that matter.
‘Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it. Perhaps in this example, we can discern that our nations are instinctively like-minded, a product of the common democratic, legal, and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day. Drawing on these values and traditions, time and again, our two countries have always found ways to come together. And when we have found that way to agree, what great change is wrought, not just for the benefit of our peoples, but of all peoples,’ said King Charles as a way of crowning his triumphant state visit.
Well, if that is fiction, bring on more and I will be forever grateful.
