Through a close mapping of Conrad's Eastern world, this book posits that Conrad's Malay Archipelago is an unknowable and unfixed construct which calls attention to the discursive collision and collusion of fiction and history. The dialogue between these contesting and contestable voices creates a constantly shifting discourse which can only be described as polyphonic and whose meaning lies endlessly in the future. Truth becomes a conversation or a relation between multiple purveyors of meaning and is in itself an illusion because, for Conrad, there are no absolute truths, only relative versions of truth. The fundamental faultline in this creative dialogue is vision. In Conrad's era, the obsession with subjective vision was evident in the proliferation of new optical devices and new techniques of seeing. Conrad viewed these with disdain; nevertheless, his belief in the superiority of fiction over these optical inventions as a way of stimulating vision compelled him to invoke the prevailing visual paradigms of his times in order to emphasize the truth of his own particular vision. Conversely, in the Eastern tales, it is the absence and deceptive nature of vision which Conrad highlights as he conjures a world which is true to himself and yet vaporous, inconclusive, open-ended and, most of all, singularly romantic.